


A Temporary Favor

by oxymoronic



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety Attacks, Billy Hargrove Is Bad at Feelings, Bisexual Steve Harrington, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Families of Choice, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Past Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Season/Series 02, Redemption, Steve Harrington Is a Mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-25 01:02:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22007413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxymoronic/pseuds/oxymoronic
Summary: It’s barely three days since El closed the gate when Hopper tells him he wants to rip a hole in space and time to rescue Billy Hargrove. Steve thinks it’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Comments: 36
Kudos: 329





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is absolute, total, unmitigated self-indulgence cheerled by wolfhalls. it begins just after the end of season 2, with the premise that Billy, stumbling round the woods outside the Byers’ house, accidentally ends up in the Upside Down.
> 
>  **re content warnings** : there is one instance of Neil being briefly physically violent in this chapter, but nothing sustained or graphic. Billy considers suicide at one point (also this chapter). canon being what it is, there’s a fair amount of racist and homophobic language/attitudes which i carry into the fic. if you feel there’s anything else i need to warn for, please do drop me a line.

“Maxine,” Neil says, and it’s the voice that makes Max flinch, the one that suggests he’s trying to keep things light and bright because he’s seriously pissed off. He’s hovering in the doorway, one hand half-raised for a knock; Max looks over the edge of her comic to stare. “Have you seen your brother?”

Max thinks back with sweet satisfaction to him sinking to the floor with her needle in his neck. “Nope,” she lies, flicking over a page. She has more interesting things to concern herself with; Wonder Woman’s fighting a dinosaur.

“Okay.” Neil lets out a little breath, like he’s at least trying to control his temper. “He went out looking for you. He never came back.”

“He’s probably wasted somewhere. Maybe he crashed his car,” she adds, with clear cheeriness.

“No,” he says slowly. “That’s the thing. His car’s here.” Max shrugs, not least for the look of irritation it flashes on Neil’s face. Playing with fire, she thinks, and then she thinks about the baseball bat full of nails and thinks she’ll probably be okay. “You know,” he continues, “You shouldn’t go out without telling us how to find you. Something could happen.”

Max rolls her eyes. “I told you. I was with some kids from my class. We had an assignment.”

Neil’s lips thin. “Warn us next time, alright? And leave a number we can reach you on.” He pauses, taking hold of the doorframe as he turns. “Which kids?” he asks.

“Will Byers,” Max answers, bored. “Uh, Dustin. Dustin Henderson.”

“Byers?” Neil frowns. “Isn’t he the little queer that hangs around with the – ”

Max feels her stomach lurch. “Did you want something else, Neil?” she interrupts, fully lowering the comic to glare.

Neil stares at her in silence for a while. “Your mother is out of town for a few days,” he says, almost offhand. There’s something in the way he says it, some underlying strangeness that makes the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

“Where?”

Neil’s annoyance visibly grows. He’s not used to questions. “Visiting cousins in Delaware,” he says.

“We don’t have cousins in Delaware,” Max replies slowly.

“Take it up with her when she gets back,” he answers smoothly. “And you should think twice before talking back to me in future, little lady,” he adds as he shuts the door.

Max pulls a face at the now-closed door. It’s possible, she decides with a gloomy look out the window, that they do have cousins in Delaware. Mom’s family lived in New Jersey while she was at school, she remembers. But for her to take off like that, leave her here with Neil –

She’s probably just being paranoid, Max decides, falling back fully onto her bed. It’s not like she’s had a normal week.

The phone’s ringing in the hall when Max gets back from school; it’s the thing that tells her that it’s still only her and Neil in the house. He never answers it, and it never rings more than twice. “Little son of a bitch,” Neil mutters, slamming it down as she comes in. “Playing hooky. I’m gonna kick his fucking ass.” He throws her a sharp look as she shuts the door. “Where have you been?”

Max bites back a retort. “I came straight home.”

“A likely story,” he sneers. “Playing house with the little faggot, I bet. You a dyke, Maxine?”

For a moment, her heart jumps into her throat and she hasn’t got a goddamn clue what to say. Then, almost absently, she thinks of Billy. Of what he’d do. “No, sir,” she says.

He snorts. “Go do your homework.”

Max slouches off to her room, sitting down on her bed and clutching her board to her chest. That same sense of wrongness is creeping up her spine again. Billy’s not – he’s not stupid. She’s seen a hundred times the way he rides the line to avoid pissing his dad off as much as he can. He’ll be fully aware that playing truant is going to get him the beating of his life. And her mom wouldn’t just up and go without –

Max moves her desk chair under the door handle; she isn’t allowed a lock. She sits back down on her bed, hugs her knees to her chest. With just her and Neil in the wind-rattled house, she suddenly feels more than a little afraid.

* * *

Billy has no idea where he is. He remembers the smell of wet leaves, slick underfoot, walking and walking and walking. He remembers the sensation of falling, further and faster and faster again. A pulsing, awful orange-yellow light, the vicious jagged slashes of blue-and-green lightning bolts, and then – darkness. But not, crucially, emptiness.

He doesn’t know what the fuck it means, but Billy feels watched.

Wherever he is, they’re in the middle of a hell of a storm. He walks, one struggling step after another, through a forest that seems to stretch for miles, that squelches awfully underfoot. There’s no moonlight, no stars to navigate by; he just dragged himself off the rain-soaked ground, picked a direction and walked.

Slowly, slowly, the woods clear away and buildings swim into view. The storm’s knocked the power out; he can’t see for shit, can’t hear anything over the squealing wind. Billy thinks he can make out the squat black shapes of buildings, houses, but there’s no cars, no people.

Billy trips. He’s been too busy squinting into the distance and trying to make something out to remember to pick up his damn feet. The surface he crashes into feels like tarmac, and he hisses at the impact, more out of annoyance at his clumsiness than any actual pain. He spins to see what threw him, and makes out – he isn’t sure what it is. It’s as thick as his leg, colored dark, lying right across the road.

The thing moves. Billy swears under his breath, scrabbles to his feet, starts to run along the tarmac – but it’s somehow there in front of him, twining round his ankle and throwing him to the ground again. He kicks at it, desperate, and remembers then the sensation – dragging, not falling, along dank, slimy ground. Whatever this thing’s attached to, it brought him here.

There’s a screech, this bone-juddering howl that sounds like it’s been wrought up from hell itself, and the thing around his leg skitters away into the darkness. He catches sight of something in the flashes of light, more of a shape than anything else, big and black and legged, crouching up above him. He’s never been so fucking terrified. Then he stands up, turns around, and sees the thing that made the sound, and has to instantly reconsider. It stands like a man, but there’s no face, no _face_ , and its arms, long and sinewy and rippling, end in claws –

A big pillar of smoke slams down next to him hard enough for the ground to shake, and Billy realizes they’re fighting over him. He turns back round and runs, harder than he has in his fucking life, away from the cacophony of screams and roars behind him. He thinks he recognizes the nearest building – he isn’t sure – he doesn’t think either of the _things_ saw him come this way –

* * *

“I need El’s help,” Max says under her breath. They’re sat huddled in a corner in recess, trying in vain to keep warm against the bitter November wind. Will’s still off sick; there’s rumors going round that he’s dead again. That he’s at home asleep in a coffin. They’ve given up arguing with them.

Mike, predictably, immediately rankles. “She’s not some _toy_ – ”

“My mom’s missing,” she interrupts with a glare. “Neil won’t tell me where she is and I don’t – I don’t trust him. I think she might be in trouble.”

Lucas makes a face. “Billy’s dad?”

“Yikes,” Dustin murmurs. “Yeah, I don’t trust him for shit.”

“El can find people, right?” Max continues. “I just thought – I don’t know. She can at least tell me my mom’s okay.”

“We should ask her,” Lucas agrees. “It’s her decision, Mike.”

“Fine,” he says tightly. “We can ask her. But you can’t get pissed if she says no.”

“Her name is Susan,” Lucas says. Mike, scowling slightly and arms crossed, is staring down at the photograph with extreme scrutiny.

“Susan?” El repeats, frowning. “Who is Susan?”

“My – my mom,” Max explains, nervous. El still scares the shit out of her, as much as she wants them to be friends. “She’s gone away – or Neil said she did, but she wouldn’t without talking to me, and I’m – I’m scared something really bad has happened to her.”

El nods. Her face is solemn. “I’ll help.”

“El – ” Mike interjects.

“I said yes,” she says again, fixing Mike with a hard stare. “Pass,” she adds, and Dustin fishes out the scarf she’s gesturing for while Lucas fetches the radio.

When she lowers the scarf from her eyes and wipes away the blood, her face is white. “Gone,” she says, voice a little shaky, and Max’s stomach drops.

“Gone, like – dead gone?” Lucas asks, and El shakes her head. She holds out her hand and flips it over.

It’s Lucas’ turn to go pale. “Oh, shit,” Dustin says.

* * *

Billy can’t see, can’t see a fucking thing, the world trapped down to a tiny little foot-wide box around him, thick with panic and adrenaline. He runs until his legs give out, until his veins are pumping acid, and then he hides like a child, curled up against trees, buildings, walls, any big, black shape he can find.

It’s like hide-and-seek, he thinks. Except that’s not true; that’s not exactly what it reminds him of, lazy summer days spent ducking in and out of rooms on tiptoes, his mom standing on their sun-washed porch counting loudly behind her hands. Really, it makes him think back to –

– _where are you, you son of a bitch_ , his father says in the echoing, empty space inside his head –

Billy jams the crux of his hands into his eyes hard enough to see stars, shaking with rage and adrenaline and fear. That thing, that mass of writhing shadows with legs, it feels like it’s – like it’s laughing at him from somewhere. He knows it isn’t behind him because he’s sat with his back against the wall, but something fucks up all the hair on the back of his neck nonetheless. The very air feels rancid against his skin.

Billy opens his eyes. Everything around him is perfectly quiet and still; there’s only the crackle-snap of thunder, throwing that ersatz, awful light across the ground.

The building opposite him is some kind of house, fancy and big. He doesn’t recognize it. Billy takes a deep, jagged breath, and throws himself towards it, heart in his throat. Billy flings himself up the stairs, three at a time, slams himself against a wall underneath a window and hides. He closes his eyes and breathes, breathes, breathes.

 _Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine_ –

A face jumps out at him from the darkness. A human face, tight, white, and terrified. “Billy?” it hisses, still not quite fully in view, and after a moment he realizes who it belongs to.

“Susan?”

* * *

Hopper’s eyes slide over each of them, considered and slow. He’s got his feet slung up on his desk; Max privately thinks it’s a dirty habit. But it’s his desk, she supposes. She’s just glad to get away from the secretary who kept trying to buy Girl Scout cookies off of her.

“Is this about Billy?” Hopper asks.

“Billy? Fuck no,” Dustin says immediately. Mike elbows him on instinct for the language. 

Max frowns. “What happened with Billy?”

“He’s not been at school all week,” Hopper says, sounding bored. “Principal’s been up my ass to find him and teach him a lesson, and his dad’s been up the Principal’s ass for telling me.” They all exchange a look. “What?” he asks, exasperated.

“My mom’s missing too,” Max says quietly. “El says she’s – ”

“Gone,” Dustin interjects. Hopper’s expression instantly turns grave.

Lucas holds out his hand and turns it over. “No, like, Upside Down gone.”

Hopper stares between them. “But she closed the gate,” he says.

“The Demogorgon could open and close gates all the time,” Mike points out quietly. “Maybe – maybe there’ll always be a way, now.”

“Maybe they went through before she closed it,” Lucas suggests.

Neither is a comforting thought. “We’re not gonna leave her there, are we?” Max hears herself ask in a small voice.

Hopper looks right at her, and his face is solemn and kind. “No, kid,” Hopper answers gently. “No, we ain’t.”

* * *

“It’s gotta be scared of something,” Billy mutters, dragging his hand through his hair. “It’s got a body, right? That means it can be hurt.” Fear, food, fucking – that’s what drives things. He’s really hoping he and Susan fall under food.

“We haven’t got any weapons,” Susan whispers back. “There’s nothing here.” He knows what she means; it’s like they’re a shadow of a place, rather than the place itself. Shadows, Billy thinks, and then goes still. Susan freezes too, looking terrified, until she realizes he’s patting himself down, hoping desperately to find –

“Fucking yes,” he breathes, pulling out his lighter. “I bet the fuckers aren’t too fond of this.”

“Then what?” Susan asks, her voice shaky but hard. “Billy, what do you think we’ll even – ?”

“Stay alive until it gets light,” Billy mutters. “Then maybe we can get our bearings, try and find a phone. There are power lines outside, they must hook up to something.” They’re going to need water pretty soon too, he thinks. Food they can cope without, but their odds of surviving without water are much, much worse.

They wait, and wait, and wait. It never gets light.

* * *

“Tell us how it happened,” Hopper says gently. “The first time.”

The look on El’s face makes her seem years older than she is. “It was an accident,” she says tiredly. “Papa just wanted me to talk.”

“To who?” Hopper asks. “To the Demogorgon?”

She nods. “I touched it. Then...” she shrugs, looks away.

“Maybe it wasn’t just you,” Max says quietly, breaking the silence. “That – that thing, the Demothingy, it was the one that could open portals, right? Maybe it, like, borrowed some of your energy or something. It’s not like you were trying to make a way through.”

“It was me,” El answers. Her voice is hard; but she looks a little unsure.

“So is that how you got back from the Upside Down?” Max asks. “You opened it up again?”

El shakes her head. “There was a hole. In the school. Then it closed.”

Max frowns. “But that was after you killed the – the – ”

“ – Demogorgon,” Dustin says helpfully.

“The Demogorgon,” Max finishes, trying not to look vaguely embarrassed at the word. “So what made the hole?”

“Maybe the Mindflayer did it,” Mike suggests.

“Or maybe there’s more than one Demogorgon,” Lucas adds.

“There were eggs,” Hopper concedes with a look of faint disgust. “In the Upside Down. I saw – I saw eggs.”

Dustin beams. “Maybe a whole ecosystem,” he says breathlessly.

Lucas rolls his eyes. “Please don’t be so excited about that,” he says flatly, and Dustin tries and fails to give him a dead arm.

“So you could do it again,” Hopper asks El, cutting across the scuffle. “If you had to.”

El nods once. Max hasn’t seen that look on her face before, that mixture of fear and nerve. It’s kind of awe-inspiring. “Yes.”

“Alright,” Hopper says, after a pause. “Alright, kid. I’ll go talk to Joyce.”

* * *

“This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard,” Steve says, aghast. “You want to tear a hole in space and time to save _Billy_?”

Hopper ignores him. “I don’t know what the right thing to do is here,” Hopper says, looking right at Joyce. “I wouldn’t lose much sleep over the boy, but Susan Hargrove – ”

“He’s just a kid,” Jonathan interrupts quietly. “Billy. He’s the same age as Nancy.”

They all turn to stare at her; she flushes. “He beat the shit out of Steve,” she says, almost defensively. Jonathan coughs pointedly, shifts, looks embarrassed; Nancy’s eyes narrow. “He went at Lucas like he was going to kill him – ”

“Please stop talking,” Hopper says tiredly. “I’m not here to write up a goddamn guestlist, I’m here to ask if you think it’s a good idea at all.”

Joyce hasn’t said a word. “If it goes wrong – ” she begins.

“I know,” Hopper interrupts, his voice soft. “But what if it was Nancy’s mom.” He pauses. “What if it was you.”

Steve thinks about his mom, trapped in that icy hell and stalked by monsters. About Barb, rotting away in another dimension while her parents sit and hope. “Does she think she can do it?” Steve asks quietly. “The girl. El. Can she shut it again after?”

“Yeah,” Hopper says. He’s resolute. “She can do it.”

* * *

“We can’t stay here,” Susan says. Her voice is rough and cracked from thirst.

Billy nods. “Get some sleep. We’ll try for one of the cars.” Fuck, he can’t stop shivering. They’re pressed up against one another, desperate for heat. “Maybe it’s just a Hawkins thing,” he adds. He wonders who he’s trying to convince.

“We can’t leave,” Susan whispers. Her cheeks are wet. “We need to find Maxine.”

Billy feels her words like a punch. He can see Max’s face in his mind, so fucking alive, full of fury and towering over him. He wishes with every inch of his being that she’s okay. “I don’t think we can,” he murmurs, and hates himself for the noise Susan makes, this choked-out little sob.

He’s right, though. They both know it. There’s nothing on the street outside except monsters and smoke. 

For a moment Billy doesn’t know what’s woken him. Susan beside him is lying quiet and still, her breathing slow and even save for the rasping catch from the cold. Then he hears it again: that low rumble, like oncoming thunder. It’s almost a feeling, more than a sound –

– Billy remembers cowering in a ball in the attic, feeling the thud-thud-thud of his father’s boots on the stairs, his snarling voice screeching _where you at, boy –_

It’s found them. It’s here. He jostles Susan awake with a jab to her side and hisses, under his breath, “ _Run._ ”

Susan runs. Billy swings around to check the window, one hand wrapped around the metal bar he ripped out of the bathroom fittings, trembling with fear. The rhythm of his heart feels like his father’s footsteps, thundering inevitably faster, inescapable. The shadow-monster towers above the building, and there are no eyes, nothing to watch with, but Billy feels fucking seen, eviscerated, like the skin is peeling right off his bones.

Outside, Susan screams. Billy snaps his attention away, sprints down the stairs after her and finds one of those _things_ stalking towards her, the ones made of flesh and blood, its nothing-face peeled open like a grotesque flower. He throws himself between them, lights the wad of cloth at the end of the pole and swings it towards the creature. “Stay the fuck back!” he yells, voice shaking with fear and fury. “Stay the fuck away from her!”

The creature gobbles out a roar, and Billy feels a rush of terror-nausea at the sound, twisted and revolting. It hangs back, clearly cautious of the fire, and Billy can’t look round, can’t check whether or not Susan’s got away; then that pillar of shadow slams back down in front of him, and Billy can’t see anything at all.

There are flashes. Horrible twisting wrenches of agony in his body and his mind. The taste of smoke in his mouth, cloying and awful, twining down his throat and bleeding through into every muscle and vein. Billy remembers screaming, begging for it to end. He remembers a girl, remembers thinking it was Max, remembers pointing at where he last saw Susan, shrieking _get her out, get her out_ – 

He’s in a hospital bed. The light in his face is fucking bright. The rickety pinging of the ECG is playing hell with the headache building up like jagged glass behind his eyes. “Easy, kid,” a voice says, jumping in out of nowhere when Billy tries to sit up; it’s a soft voice. A kind voice. “You took a hell of a knock.”

“What the fuck?” Billy mutters, or tries to; he doesn’t think much of it actually gets out. He sees the glint of a police badge, the soft tan color of the uniform.

“You got lost in the woods,” the man adds, sat next to his bed. The badge on his chest reads Hopper. “Hit your head.”

His head does fucking hurt. Billy wants to reach up and touch it, but his arms feel like lead; he wonders if he hurt them in the fall. He remembers – thinks he remembers, he slipped, something caught at his leg –

Panic hits him like a freight train; Billy hurtles upright in the bed. “Susan – ”

“Your stepmother’s fine,” Hopper answers, voice gentle, hand steady on Billy’s chest to push him back down. “Doctors say you’ll have some headaches, residual nausea. To come back in if you start having problems with your vision or if the pain don’t stop in a while.” Hopper’s watching him carefully, so sharply it makes him want to squirm. “Your dad’s here to take you home,” he adds, and Billy’s stomach drops. Shit, he thinks. Now he’s fucking for it.

Neil waits in silence for him to get dressed. He fumbles every movement, can feel every twitch of his father’s lips like a slap, the tightness of his brow, tension racking up at Billy’s incompetence no matter how swiftly he tries to move. Neil is gracious and apologetic to the doctors and the nurses, prolific in his goodbyes and well-wishes, and then slams Billy’s head into the dashboard the minute they get in the car.

Billy’s vision blacks out. His ears ring like sirens. He doesn’t think he passes out; but he doesn’t remember driving away from the hospital, and when he next looks out the window it’s all blue skies and fields. “Do you have any fucking idea how much this is going to cost?” his father spits, and Billy flinches at the sound of it. “They should’ve left you out there to rot.”

“Yes, sir,” Billy murmurs, watching the world race by as his vision sparks and blurs. “Sorry, sir.”

* * *

It’s always a dangerous game, approaching Neil. Max remembers one weekend back when they first moved through to Hawkins, back when even Billy’s breathing seemed to do nothing but piss Neil off. He’d thrown Billy around the room for stomping around, then thrown him around the room for sneaking up on him. That was back when Max thought that Neil’s outbursts were driven by reason.

It’s a Saturday. Her mom’s out buying clothes or groceries or some other dumb excuse to avoid Max’s constant vigil, checking on her every two minutes like she might get hauled off again at any moment; so it’s just her and Neil, sat sucking on one of his disgusting cigars in his favourite armchair. He told her mom he didn’t smoke when they met.

Dustin hits her up on the walkie and says they’re all heading to The Palace to destroy her highscore on Pengo. Dustin doesn’t even fucking like Pengo. She checks the house three times for Billy, but there’s no sign of him; so she tries to find some neutral middle ground and walks calmly over to her stepfather instead.

Neil turns a page of his magazine. “Don’t hover, Maxine. It’s irritating.”

“Sorry,” she says instantly. It makes her feel spineless, and that twists a sourness in her stomach she’s already too familiar with. “I was hoping – could you drive me to the arcade?”

Neil doesn’t even look at her. “Get Billy to take you.”

Max pauses. More dangerous than approaching him is talking back. “He’s not here,” she says tentatively.

“His car’s out front,” he answers with finality, tapping off the ash.

Max frowns. She glances at the window, sees he isn’t wrong; but Billy definitely isn’t here. She checks around again, remembers the porch, stands there stumped when it’s also empty. She stays out there for a moment, glaring out into the gloom; they’ve had the first real snow of winter, and the ground around their little house is covered in a foot of it. It’s kind of pretty, she thinks. Shitty for skateboarding, though.

Eventually she sees it; there’s a dent in the snow, leading off back towards the woods. Too well-established to be a fox. He must’ve gone for a walk or something. Max finds her thickest coat, pulls on her boots and follows the trail into the dark.

She finds Billy in a lake about a half-mile down the track. He’s naked in the water, the surface kissing the small of his back. She can’t see any shoes. Where he hasn’t broken through, the ice skimming the top is inches thick. Billy stands there in the freezing water and watches her with a calm neutrality that’s completely unnerving. “You okay, Max?” he asks, like she’s the one acting strange.

She hesitates. “I wanted – I wanted to go to the arcade,” she says.

Billy nods. “Sure,” he answers, flicking back his hair. “I’ll be right up.”

“There’s something wrong with Billy,” Max says, voice tight with worry as she crashes into the side of Pengo.

The machine rocks alarmingly on its axis; Lucas cries out in protest, loses his grip on the joystick, and Dustin pounces, scooting in to grab the controls. “Yeah,” Dustin replies, totally focused on the stupid pixellated penguin in front of him. “He’s a dickhead.”

Max rolls her eyes “No, like. _Wrong_ wrong,” she insists. “He’s acting all weird.”

“Shit! Stupid fucking sno-bees,” Dustin shouts, slapping the dashboard. He relents to Mike shoving him aside with a scowl.

“The doctors said he was fine,” Mike says, lower lip between his teeth, eyes flicking around the screen.

“Grownups get like that sometimes,” Dustin says knowledgeably. “Like when Nancy got all pissy with us last month when we ate all the caramac bars even though she said she didn’t want one.”

“Yeah,” Lucas says, rolling his eyes, “That’s because she was on her – hey!”

“Dude, gross, that’s my sister!” Mike interrupts, thumping his arm, and promptly spirals into penguin doom. “Shit, look what you made me do.”

“There’s nothing disgusting about the menstrual cycle,” Dustin solemnly says, and Max, praying silently for strength, checks out of the resulting hysteria and wanders off out front for the relative quiet.

The air is ice-cold against her skin, drizzled with a thin, miserable rain that can’t be bothered to turn to snow. She squints up at it dismissively; then she catches sight of Steve, leant up against the wall beside the door and halfway through a pack of cigarettes. She watches carefully as he finishes one, throws it down into the snow, and lights another. “What are you doing here?” Max asks, shuffling closer for the cover.

Steve throws her a look. “What do you think? I’m on chauffeur duty for those chucklefucks,” he says, thumbing back at the door, and the two of them look back through the glass at the scuffling bunch of boys now clamoring for control of Dig Dug.

“It’s Saturday,” Max says.

Steve mouth twists up unhappily. “Yeah,” he says, dragging on the cigarette. “I know.”

“So don’t you have something better to do?”

Steve snorts. “You’d think,” he mutters. He glances over at her. “Is your mom doing okay?”

Max shrugs one shoulder listlessly. She won’t talk about it; or not to her, anyway. But she’s been hanging out with Joyce Byers a lot, and that gives Max hope. “How’s your face?”

Steve smiles. It’s a kind smile, Max thinks, though somehow sad. “It’ll heal,” he answers, over-casual. He nods towards his car, parked out front. “You wanna ride home or something?”

Max shakes her head. “No, I should probably go back in.” She has a few highscores to re-establish. “Thanks, though.”

They’re huddled round the payphone out front, Lucas and Dustin bickering about the best way to share body heat, when Mike brings Steve over. He looks despairingly between the two of them like he’s trying to decide whether to bother interjecting, and then asks Max if everything’s okay instead. “She can’t get through to Billy,” Mike explains. “And we’re out of change.”

Steve sighs, reaches into his jeans and drops a few coins into Max’s hands. She picks up the phone, dials for the seventh time; it rings, and rings, and rings. “He’s not answering,” Max says, hanging up again.

“Look, it’s freezing out here and I’m fresh out of quarters,” Steve says tiredly, and gestures back at his car. “Just let me drop you. It’s cool, honestly,” he insists when she begins to protest. “You’re basically on my way home anyway.”

She must look worried; Dustin smiles at her encouragingly. “He’s probably just playing his stupid music too loud,” Lucas says.

She’s the last one in the car, just her and Steve cruising down Cherry Lane, him humming along to some cheery pop nonsense on the radio and drumming out the rhythm on the steering wheel. “Right here,” Max says, pointing at the house, and Steve obediently tucks the car in behind Billy’s obnoxious blue Camaro.

The front door is hanging open. Only Billy’s car sits in the driveway, and every single light in the house is out. “Okay,” Steve says slowly. “That’s fucking weird.” They share a look; he kills the engine. “I’ll get the bat,” he says.

They edge into the house together, steady and slow. The hall light flicks on no problem, but the place inside is trashed, shit thrown haphazard all over the floor, a fist-shaped hole beside the mirror in the hallway. She traces the edges of it with her fingertips; Neil is going to lose his goddamn mind, she thinks. “Billy?” Max hazards; silence.

“The TV’s still here,” Steve says from the living room, sticking his head back round the doorframe. “There’s a bunch of money on the table too. I don’t think you were robbed.”

Max walks inside and looks around. It’s thick with broken glass and the sour tang of spilt liquor. She sees the empty cabinet beside the bookcase and her stomach drops; Neil’s gun is missing, the one he keeps for rats, he says, in the cellar, even though none of them ever sees any goddamn rats. Outside, Max sees that dent in the snow again, and understanding dawns on her in a horrible, electric wave. “Steve,” Max says, opening the back door, “Call Hopper,” and steps outside before he can reply.

He can’t have gotten far, she thinks. She might already be too late. Max pushes that unhelpful thought aside and walks into the woods with the baseball bat. 

He’s standing with his back to her, out by the lake. Head back, face tilted up to the dying sun. “Billy,” she says, quietly. “Don’t.”

Billy turns. His eyes are bright and red, and Neil’s gun is hanging loose in his palm. There’s an empty bottle of whiskey by his feet, upturned in the snow. Max walks towards him, perfectly calm; she’s pleased to find she’s no longer afraid of him. If she feels anything at all, it’s pity. “Stop it, Billy,” she continues, voice cool. “You don’t get to do that.”

Black lines ripple and pulse beneath his skin, and Max stops dead in her tracks. “He’s in me,” Billy says. The gun in his hand shakes. Max’s stomach lurches with an awful, bone-deep fear. “He needs me.” He sounds fucking terrified. “He needs me _alive_.”

Max tries not to panic. “Billy,” she says, forcing her tone more gentle, taking another step. She’s almost close enough to grab his arm.

“He wants me to hurt her,” Billy says hoarsely. He looks like a child when he cries, she thinks. “You. But I won’t.” He shakes his head like his ears are buzzing with flies. “I _won’t_.”

“I know,” Max says; it’s at least a half truth. She holds out her hand. “It’s okay, Billy.” She risks another step. “Give it to me.”

Slowly, horribly, Billy’s eyes empty out. There’s nothing human looking back at her when she meets his gaze, and Max’s blood runs ice-cold. He looks up, over Max’s shoulder.

“Evening, officer,” Billy says.

Everything around Max seems to move both very fast and very slow. Billy’s hand begins to rise; Hopper’s arm finds her from nowhere, throwing her sideways into the snow; and Steve slams into Billy from behind, sends him careening madly forwards to the ground. “Stay down, kid,” Hopper says, and Billy thrashes and snarls, a torn, inhuman sound, bucks up under Steve and tries to lunge for Neil’s gun; Hopper ducks and grabs it, walks out of his reach. “Shit, kid, stay _down_.”

“Billy?” Max calls, pushing Hopper aside to kneel down next to him. Steve watches her carefully, sat across Billy’s ass with a hand around Billy’s wrists, wrenched round to the small of his back. She pushes Billy’s hair back, peers down at his blank face. “Billy,” she tries again. “It’s okay. We can fix it. We can fix it.”

“Fix what?” Hopper asks slowly, and Billy’s smile turns feral as his skin pulses black.

“Oh, shit,” Steve says.

It’s been three long hours since they crashed through the doors at Hawkins Lab, Billy slung over Hopper’s shoulder like a sack of flour. They’d had to knock him out to get him there, gagged and tied in a way that made Max queasy. He’s strapped to a bed in a room where the lights strobe out and the door’s been ripped off the wall; at least there aren’t any bloodstains, she thinks. The hallway stank like a hospital, which is to say that it smelt like chemicals and death.

“You doing okay?” her mom asks gently, and the sound makes Max jump. She nods, fidgets a little in the uncomfortable chair. They’re either side of the bed, like they’re holding vigil. Or keeping watch. Steve’s sat across the room on the floor, his back to the wall, eyes on his knees. He looks exhausted, somehow small. She wonders whether he’s having trouble sleeping too.

Hopper appears in the doorway. “They’re gonna try and get Owens on the phone,” he says, looking down towards the bed. “He still out?”

Susan nods. “He’s freezing.” She’s holding Billy’s hand; the visual is undeniably strange. Max doesn’t think they’ve even touched before. “I shouldn’t have sent him out looking for Max,” Susan adds, voice fraught. “This is all my – ”

“Don’t be stupid,” Hopper interrupts gently. “This kind of thing isn’t anyone’s fault. Besides, he’s gonna be fine.” Her mom looks unconvinced; Hopper sounds unconvinced. “Should I ring his dad?”

“No,” Susan says, at the exact same time that Max does. “No,” Susan continues. “It’s. It’s better if I stay with him instead.”

“Okay,” Hopper says, taken aback. He glances over at Steve, sat motionless on the floor across the room. The bruises Billy gave him are still stark against his skin. Max can’t help but wonder what he makes of them. “Steve, can you take Max home?”

Steve jerks, looks slowly between the two of them. “Uh, sure – ”

“ – Mom – ” Max interjects, more worried about her than Billy –

Susan smiles at her. “It’s okay,” she reassures her. “You don’t have to stay.”

“Trust me, it’s probably better if you don’t,” Hopper adds in a murmur, and the silence that follows is nothing but ominous.

The roads are quiet as they wind back through the woods, the snow slurrying up under the wheels. Steve switches on the radio, lets the chatter fill up the space, flinches a little every time the signal drops out. They’re just about to turn down Cherry Lane when Max suddenly says, “Don’t.”

Steve pauses at the junction, turn signal going click, click, click. “I’m not taking you back.”

She shakes her head. “I just – I don’t want to. Take me to – to Will’s?”

Steve looks at her for a long, steady moment. “Okay,” he says, pulling away. “But you’re calling your mom to let her know.”

* * *

Steve keeps the baseball bat by his bedroom door. He probably shouldn’t; but it comforts him, and he’s not thinking hard enough about it to let it worry him. It’s times like this he’s grateful for it, edging alone through the empty house, squinting down through the mist at the driveway to see who the fuck is hammering on the front door at five on a Sunday. It’s some comfort, he thinks, that demogorgons probably don’t bother to knock.

He sees the police car first, stark against the blackness of the tarmac, and his stomach flips in fear. He hasn’t spoken to his mom in – god, like, three days? Maybe four? He curls his fingers round the wooden handle of the bat, tries to find some scrap of courage as he walks down the stairs and opens up the door.

“Hi,” Hopper says, like this is wholly normal. Like Steve’s the weird one for answering the door while holding a baseball bat.

“Hi,” Steve says back, slowly. “Is everything – ?”

Hopper jerks his thumb back towards his car, and it’s only then that Steve sees Billy, hunched up in the back seat. “I need to ask a favor,” Hopper says, heavy and apologetic. “I didn’t know where else to take him. Mrs Hargrove – she doesn’t think it’s safe for him to go home.”

Steve looks over Hopper’s shoulder, back towards the car. “Is he – ?”

“He’s fine,” Hopper says. “It’s done. And this is – it’s only temporary, I swear.”

Steve hesitates, then nods once. “There’s plenty room,” he says. “My parents won’t be back til next month.”

Hopper’s face floods with relief. “Thanks, kid. I owe you one.”

Billy says fucking nothing when Hopper leads him inside, thanks Hopper in a quiet voice when he says goodbye and then stands there in silence, hands in the pockets of his stupid ugly jeans, glancing around the lobby in a way that makes Steve’s hackles rise.

“We have a guestroom,” Steve says; Billy just looks at him, steady and calm. Steve leads him up the stairs and down the hall, points out the linen closet and the en suite, says in an offhand voice to help himself to whatever he wants. His parents’ bedroom is right across the hall, doesn’t have a lock on it, and that makes Steve twitchy. Steve digs out an old t-shirt and sweatpants from the closet and drops them on the bed. “I’m gonna crash out for a few hours,” Steve says, leaning up in the doorway as Billy paces round the room. He looks caged.

“Need to go home,” Billy says. His voice is surprisingly hoarse. “Pick up some stuff.”

Steve nods. “I’ll run you over.” They stand there in silence for a moment, Steve hanging in the doorway, Billy staring off into the distance, fingers loose by his side. His knuckles are swollen and red; Steve clenches his jaw. “Don’t fucking steal anything,” he adds, and shuts the door.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve wakes to the bright smell of fresh coffee. For a moment he thinks his parents are home early, feels that little happy kick of surprise in his chest; then he remembers, rolls over and groans into the pillow. At least it’s light outside this time, Steve thinks, and drags himself out of bed.

Billy’s sat at the breakfast bar, shoulders hunched, staring off out into the forest. It’s a nice view, Steve thinks, if you can’t imagine an interdimensional monster crawling out of the trees and mauling your ex-girlfriend’s classmate to death. He’s still wearing Steve’s ratty t-shirt, riding up at the back to show the dimples at the base of his spine. He goes still when he hears Steve’s footsteps, glances over at him with an expression of guilt that’s quickly schooled calm; Steve contemptuously lets the silence hang in the air, crosses over to the coffee pot and pours himself a mug.

“You could say thank you,” Steve says when Billy stays quiet, leaning back up against the counter.

The way Billy’s jaw clenches fills him with malevolent pleasure. “Thanks,” Billy says, after a pause.

“Yeah, well,” Steve says coolly. “Hopper’s got enough to deal with.” It’s been a while since he had the scope to be an unapologetic dickhead; he figures if anyone deserves it, it’s Billy. “You still want that ride?”

Billy nods, sliding off the stool. “I’ll get dressed.”

Steve glances at the clock. “Won’t they be home?”

“It’s Sunday,” Billy says over his shoulder. “They’ll be at church.”

Steve watches him walk out, even, quiet steps, shoulders rounded, head down. He looks like a wounded dog, Steve thinks, with not a little satisfaction. It’s about time something took him down a peg or two.

* * *

Steve drops him at the corner, speeds away without so much as a backwards glance. Billy pushes back the urge to flip off his dwindling tail-lights, scuffs the kerb with his heel and skirts round the house instead. There’s no point trying the door; his dad will have changed the locks again. But he knows Max has been sneaking out of her bedroom window, and it’s easy enough to climb in.

What he hadn’t expected was Max, lying across her bed and flicking through one of her stupid magazines. She sits bolt upright the moment the window flies up, then jumps off the bed and tries to block his way inside. “What are you doing here?”

“Getting some stuff,” he mutters, shouldering past her and down towards his room. There’s a padlock on the doorhandle; he smirks, kicks it off. Inside is totally trashed, clothes strewn across the floor, holes in the wall, mirror shattered. Shards of glass speckle the carpet, glinting up at him maliciously as he flicks on the bare bulb. “Fuck,” he murmurs. “Did I do this?”

“Some of it,” Max says, leant up against the wall in the hallway and glaring at him. “Neil thinks you’re on drugs.” I fucking wish, Billy thinks. He picks his way carefully inside, grabs a duffel from the wardrobe and starts filling it with clothes. “So what,” Max says slowly, “You’re just gonna run away?”

“Don’t be dumb. I’m staying with – ” He pauses, briefly at a loss to describe the stupid deal Steve and Hopper have made. “A friend.”

“You don’t have any friends,” Max says flatly.

Billy ignores her, stuffs a few of his textbooks in the top of the bag and zips it up. He pushes past her again, tugs open the front door, and then pauses in the doorway, one hand on the frame. “Is your mom okay?” he asks.

Max scowls. “Why do you care?”

Billy smiles, a sad, twisted grimace that sits poorly on his face. “Take care of yourself, Max,” he says, and closes the door.

It takes him a hot minute to fully recognize the car next to him when he parks up in Steve’s drive besides the fact that it’s familiar; it’s a brick-built people wagon thing in an ugly shade of mauve. Susan’s car. Billy kills the engine, ignores the biting hit of cold that knifes in once the heater’s no longer on. He’d almost driven right out of Hawkins entirely. There’s still time, he supposes.

In his mind he hears the scream she’d made, back when they were trapped together in that other place. Fuck it, he thinks. He at least owes her hello.

She’s sat making small talk with Steve in the stupidly large living room, admiring the original Picasso hanging above the fireplace. It’s exactly the kind of thing she’d notice and Billy wouldn’t. He wonders if Steve even realizes how much something like that is worth. “I’ll leave you two alone,” Steve says, bolting the moment Billy walks through the door; so Billy drops his bag on the ottoman by the window, keeps his steps slow and lazy as he crosses the room to sit down on the couch.

“He seems nice,” Susan says. Billy doesn’t answer. “It’s kind of him to let you stay,” she adds, almost to herself.

No, Billy thinks, he’s just a dickhead with a spare room who wanted a favor off a cop. “You okay?” he asks in lieu of arguing.

She’s conjured up an unconvincing smile. “I’m fine,” she insists. “I wanted to see how you were.”

Billy shrugs. “What have you told him?”

Her smile falters. She knows instantly from his tone he means Neil. “That you were at the hospital, having some more tests done,” she says. He won’t have taken that well, Billy thinks. “He’s – worried about you.”

Billy’s mouth runs sour. Worried about the money, more like. He glances round the room, a hundred little happy pictures beaming up at him, bar mitzvahs and wedding days. “Has he ever hit you?” he asks, voice a little rough. It isn’t as much of a non-sequitur as you might think.

For a long while she says nothing. “No,” she answers, eventually. “He hasn’t. Did he – did he hit her?”

He shakes his head. “Not at first,” he says. “It was just me. He doesn’t like to hit girls if he can help it.” He glances at her, sat rigidly on the sofa, somehow small against the vast leather bulk of it; it’s overwhelming, the urge he gets to protect her from him. From them. “It doesn’t mean he won’t.”

She looks away, out towards the creeping blackness of the trees. “You didn’t warn me,” Susan says, voice soft. It’s not accusatory so much as confused.

Billy smiles humorlessly. “Everything you knew about me came from him. Would you have believed me?”

“No,” Susan admits, in time. “No, I guess not.”

He sees her to the door; there’s no sign of Steve. They stand there awkwardly together in the hallway, letting in the cold from the crisp November air. For a minute she looks like she wants to hug him, but she doesn’t. “All that shit that we saw,” Billy says quietly, staring out into the black. “The time we spent in that place. That really happened?”

Susan hesitates. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, it did.”

Base fear drags cold fingers hard down his spine; those things were real. That world is real. That thing inside his head was real. “Then I’m glad you’re okay,” he says.

* * *

Down the hall, Billy is screaming. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.

When Steve wakes at the sound of it, for an awful moment he thinks he might throw up from fear; but then he runs automatically through his practiced routine, staring at a familiar point on his bedroom wall and breathing like a metronome until his heartbeat slows back down. He sits there in the dark, wondering if he should let the nightmare run its own course, knowing full-well that Billy Hargrove isn’t the sort of guy to take kindly to sympathy. But fuck, those kids have made him real softhearted. He drags himself up out of bed, shoots a wistful look at the baseball bat and walks quietly down the hall.

Steve knocks hard on the door, waits a moment, then pushes it open. In spite of whatever hell Billy’s stuck in the middle of, he’s clearly a light sleeper; he’s up out of bed and pressed up against the wall before Steve’s even got a foot inside, hair clammy and stuck to his face with sweat.

Steve takes a step closer, hesitant. “Billy?”

He can see the corded muscle in Billy’s neck, glistening with sweat. “Don’t touch me,” Billy snaps hoarsely, eyes like atom bombs glaring at him through the darklight. “Don’t fucking touch me, Harrington.”

Steve stills, lowering his hand. “I’m not gonna touch you,” he says, voice over-gentle. Steve sinks slowly to the floor, sits with his back against the wall across the room and just breathes with him instead.

Billy only dozes off again at around the time light starts to peek under the curtains. They must’ve been sat there for hours, four feet apart in the pitch black room, breathing raggedly in sync. It felt strangely intimate, almost more so than if Steve had reached out and touched him after all.

Susan’s rung up and got Billy the week off school; Steve should be so fucking lucky. He ducks out of the room quietly to shower and change, checks in on Billy again before he leaves, almost forgets his Spanish homework on the kitchen counter as he fusses in the hallway over whether or not to wake him.

In the absence of Billy’s Camaro, Steve’s Bimmer gets to cruise into the best spot. It’s fucking bizarre, Steve thinks, the way that Hawkins High accepts it without blinking. A shoal of sophomores glides out of Steve’s way as he heads towards the entrance, the guys posturing and the girls murmuring as he goes by. With Billy absent and Nancy out of the picture, Steve supposes that makes him prime real estate again. It all seems more than a little pathetic.

“Hey, Harrington,” a voice says, and Steve glances back over his shoulder to see Tommy loping over to fall into step beside him. The fact they haven’t spoken in, like, a month and a half seems to be totally irrelevant. “Man, Mrs J’s test is gonna fucking kill me,” he continues, entirely ignoring the fact Steve hadn’t even answered him. “What the fuck is her problem? Maybe I should go tell the Principal I caught her sucking off Mr Westerby in the teachers’ lounge. I bet she’d stop with the fucking pruebos then. Later,” he finishes, slapping Steve on the back and disappearing into the nearest classroom.

Steve stands there in the hall for a moment, staring blankly at the now-empty doorway. “It’s pruebas, dickhead,” he mutters under his breath, and walks away just as the bell goes.

* * *

Any other time Billy would be fucking gleeful at the chance to skip school, justified or otherwise. Here, now, he’s just sat on his dick in this big empty mortuary of a house, staring at photos of the little happy family, datable mainly by Mr Harrington’s mercilessly receding hair.

It’s a nice fucking house, Billy will admit. The living room has a goddamn harp in it. _Don’t steal anything_ , Billy remembers Steve saying with an unmistakable sneer; yeah, right. Billy could turn a whole room over and they probably wouldn’t even notice. He’s already pocketed a couple pairs of earrings for good measure.

He’s had more than enough of pacing round this museum of a home by the time it reaches midday. He showers, shaves, throws on a fresh set of clothes from his duffel and tears off down the street without a glance back.

It feels so fucking good to have the wheel under his palms again, the wind in his hair, the radio on stupid-loud, only a hint of the yowling tires bleeding through the beat. He drives and drives and drives, runs stupid laps of Hawkins like it’s the Grand Prix, and then hits the road up to the quarry at well over sixty. The drop comes into sight, and Billy grins, wicked and breathless. He holds it, holds it, holds it – then slams the breaks, careening forward for a moment with such power that he’s sure for one long, hot second that he’s missed it, that he’s going to shoot right over and plummet off the cliff.

He doesn’t. The car shudders to a halt right at the edge, rocking viciously on its suspension, and Billy lets out a tight, hot breath, sharp and feral between his teeth. He gets out of the car to check; there’s maybe half a foot between his wheel and the drop. Jesus, he thinks with no little satisfaction, it had been close.

Billy climbs up on the hood with his pack of cigarettes, smokes them idly one by one. There’s no-one else here; fucking local jerkwads don’t even have the intelligence to bunk. It gives him nothing to think about except the mess of last night, sitting sour on his stomach like quick-drunk beer. The fear he can take; the humiliation is worse. He can’t unsee Steve fucking Harrington bursting into the room, staring at him like he’s some kind of freak. The way they’d sat there together for hours, Billy cowering up against the wall like a goddamn child. He flicks the butt over the cliff edge, watching it drift inevitably down to hit the water below. Fucking mortifying. Steve must think he’s a joke.

Billy hears the distant crunch of gravel under tyres, and on pure instinct he goes still with dread. He sincerely doubts his old man would go to the effort of looking for him, but if he does find him he’s totally fucked. But the car that eventually peeks into sight isn’t his dad’s; it’s a cop. The same cop from the hospital, he realizes when he gets out of the car. The one who dropped him off at Steve’s.

He walks over with that familiar, slow-legged saunter. “You okay there, kid?” he asks.

Billy finishes another cigarette, chucks it over the side. “Peachy,” he says. He blows the blue-gray cloud of smoke in Hopper’s face.

“I bet,” Hopper murmurs, looking him up and down. Billy hates the way it makes him feel, off-kilter and somehow seen.

“Did you want something?” he asks, and then, after a deliberate pause, he tacks on a “Sir?”

Hopper looks wholly unimpressed. “Got a call from Hawkins Lab,” he says. “They want me to bring you in for tests.”

Billy can’t help a flinch. “Right now?” he asks, voice a little rough, trying and failing to muster back some of his bravado.

Hopper raises an eyebrow. “Sorry, were you busy?”

Billy spreads his arms by way of acquiescence, hops off the hood. “We taking your ride or mine?”

“Mine,” Hopper says flatly. “Don’t worry. I don’t insist on the cuffs.”

“Is it still here?” Billy asks, glancing around the room. “That – that thing you took out of me. Did you kill it?”

The doctor looks at him, curious. “What do you think?”

Billy’s lips go thin. “I don’t fucking know, man, that’s why I asked.”

“There’s no need for that language,” he replies, and Billy holds back the urge to flip him off. The room makes him edgy. He doesn’t remember much of what happened, but the echo of what he does is enough. Pain, blood, the burnt-copper taste of pure fear.

The doctor makes him edgy. The tests make him edgy. The world seems to make him edgy, these days.

“Tell me what you see,” the doctor says.

Billy stares at the writhing black form on the paper, all snarling teeth and gaping maw, and answers, flatly, “A beautiful butterfly.”

Hopper drops him off at the quarry after, like he’s been out on a fucking playdate. Billy feels jittery, spooked, like the doctor’s dumbass cards have poked awake something in his psyche he’d rather not see.

“Do me a favor,” Hopper says, sitting in the car with the engine killed. “Come by the station sometime. I get off around five.”

Shit. Hospital is one thing; a jail cell is totally another. If he gets another caution his dad really will kill him. Billy wets his lips, nervous. “Am I under arrest, officer?”

“No,” Hopper replies, smiling just a little, as Billy goes for the car door. “There’s just someone I think you should meet.”

* * *

Part of Steve thinks it’s fucking unbelievable, the way the school molds into place like elastic around him. Billy’s been out of school for a week and two days, and Carol and Tommy and Nicole are snapping gum beside Steve’s locker like the last six months never happened. Their chattering fills the air around him, makes him think not-too-pleasantly of flies.

He wonders if they know Billy’s crashing at his. What they’d think about the silent meal they’d shared last night, Billy wearing Steve’s hoodie and sweatpants and eating three-day-old pizza straight out the box. He wonders what they’d think about demogorgons and rotting tunnels and the world beyond. Fuck, he wishes he still had Nancy to talk to. He’s getting a headache and it’s barely nine a.m.

“Heads up,” Tommy says suddenly, jerking his chin along the corridor, and Steve’s attention snaps towards him. It’s Nancy, walking towards him in that stiff-backed way, shoulders square and chin high. It kicks a little something, short and sharp in his chest. She doesn’t want you, he can’t help but think. She wants Jonathan fucking Byers more than you.

Carol blows and snaps a bubble, overly loud. “What do you want, Wheeler?” she asks.

Nancy ignores her, looking straight at Steve. There’s just the slightest flush coloring her cheekbones – annoyance or embarrassment, Steve isn’t sure. “You skipped out on me. The library?”

Tommy sniggers. Fuck it, Steve thinks. Old habits. He leans back against his locker, tilts up his head. “Yeah, well,” he answers, almost a drawl, and conjures up a passable smirk. “Guess I figured you didn’t need the excuse of revising with me now you’re sitting on Byers’ dick instead.”

Nancy goes white. She looks like she’s been slapped. Her mouth opens, like for a moment she’s formulating a reply, and then she gives him this look, revulsion twisted up with disappointment, and stalks off, turning sharply on her heel. “I’d wash it first,” Carol calls after her, gleeful, as Tommy slams his locker rhythmically with chants of _King Steve_ , _King Steve_. “Fuck knows what farm animal it’s been in.”

Steve wishes he felt guilty, wishes he felt like shit. But damn if in that moment it doesn’t feel fucking good.

The dark’s always well on its way when Steve gets home from school these days. It doesn’t change his routine; he gets home, switches clothes, walks out into the forest and runs.

Some days time passes like he’s playing chicken with nothing. He sits in Math and Physics and Spanish and fidgets, fidgets, fidgets, doesn’t let himself look out the window more than twice, wears pale grooves into the fabric of his jeans as he runs his nails back-and-forth across the fabric. His brain doesn’t wipe clean again until he’s home, until he’s run laps of the trail outside his house wrapped up in sweat. It’s worse in the dark, or maybe better. It gets him to that headspace faster, where there’s nothing in the universe except the acid in his lungs and the knowledge that whatever’s chasing him is eating dirt.

It’s the only time he’s grateful his parents are away. He knows what he must look like, arriving back at the house drenched in mud and sweat and rain, knows he can’t possibly explain. He knows exactly what Susan sees when he gets back from his hundredth lap and his skin feels like it can barely hold him, his heartbeat feral and ricocheting through his chest.

“Hi,” Susan says slowly from the shelter of the porch, Steve standing out in the rain and trying to catch his breath. “I brought some stuff for Billy,” she explains, gesturing back at the ugly car parked in the drive.

Steve nods, pushing past her to unlock the door and kick off his sneakers. “You want a drink or something?” Steve asks, fetching a towel for his muddy hair.

Susan shakes her head. “I should get back,” she replies, glancing around the foyer. “It’s so quiet here.”

Steve doesn’t know how to answer this, so he doesn’t. “You want a hand? With the stuff.”

“No, it’s okay. Are – are you sure you’re good having him?” she asks, looking Steve over. He wonders what she’s had to put up with from Billy, what she’s seen him do to look so concerned. He wonders if it was before or after they were trapped in a nether dimension together with a bunch of monsters.

Steve thinks about the bat propped up beside his bedroom door. He feels himself smile, graceless and a little cruel. “I’ve dealt with worse,” he says.

* * *

Billy leans up against the wall across the street, dragging on his third consecutive cigarette. The last time he was inside Hawkins PD was when he got hauled in for a suspected DUI, not long after they moved here; he was sober as a fucking judge, but the shiner his old man had given him was fucking with his vision and he ended up all over the road. They dragged him through the station, asked a few lackluster questions about the mess on his face and let him go. His dad was careful not to hit anything anyone might notice after that.

Hopper leaves the building at exactly five twenty-five. Billy does nothing, staring down the universe with his customary distrust, but Hopper makes a beeline right at him with what looks like a genuine smile. “Good to see you, kid.”

Billy’s jaw clenches. “Can we get this over with?”

Hopper just gives him this look, like every word Billy spits is transparently bullshit. “C’mon,” he says, and nods him towards his car. That, he hadn’t expected.

They drive south, away from the center of town. The snow’s churned up into black muck on the road; it’s been too cold for more, apparently. He knows fucking nothing about snow. “You grew up in Cali, right?” Hopper asks, and Billy glances at him, wary. “How’d you end up here?”

Billy’s lips twitch. “My dad wanted a clean break,” he says.

“Yeah? From what?” Billy shrugs. There’s no point in elaborating; Hopper’s a good enough cop to sniff out the lie. “What did he do? Your dad, back in Cali.”

“He was a cop, actually,” Billy says. “Now he works in a hardware store.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

Billy throws him a look. “Work in a hardware store?” he asks flatly.

Hopper smiles, just a little. “No. Be a cop.”

“No,” Billy says, stronger than he meant to, then remembers who he’s with, shifts a little in the seat. “No offence, sir,” he tacks on, nervous.

Hopper’s smile stays put. “None taken. Sometimes I’m not sure I want to be a cop anymore either.”

They start off down a dirt track, almost hidden from view. The trees tower over them like megaliths, hiding the dying sunlight in a cloak of black, and Billy bites his lip, twitchy. “You’re not gonna murder me, are you?” he asks, maybe half-joking, as the track begins to slim.

“We’re nearly there,” Hopper says by way of reply. It’s distinctly unreassuring. The track ends, and Hopper kills the engine, gestures for him to follow, rolls his eyes at Billy’s hesitation. “C’mon, kid. You’re not worth the paperwork.”

He’s got a gun on his waistband; it’s not like there’s much point in arguing. Billy climbs out of the car, kicks the door shut behind him for the hell of it, and then spots the squat little shape of the cabin in the darklight. It’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it suspicious. “You live here?”

“I like the quiet,” Hopper says flatly, and Billy snorts.

He follows Hopper up a path only he seems to see, twitching crossly when Billy steps out of line. Billy’s surprised to hear the sound of a TV when they make it to the door; more surprised to find a child sat in front of it, a little girl, all doe-eyes and curls. “I didn’t know you had a kid,” Billy says slowly, hesitating in the doorway as Hopper stamps inside.

“I don’t,” Hopper answers cheerily. “It’s complicated.” The girl stares back at him, smiling just a little, her expression wholly calm. It’s been a while since Billy met someone who wasn’t, in some way, afraid of him. “You want a beer?”

Billy shifts on his feet. “I’m seventeen,” he says, like it’s a test. Hopper just gives him a look before he hands Billy one from the fridge, ice-cold against his fingers.

“Soda, please?” the girl asks, and Hopper complies; there’s the same look on his face that Billy sees on Susan’s sometimes, looking at Max, fond and exasperated all at once. He wonders if Hopper knocked up some out-of-towner and ended up saddled with the kid. He takes a pull of the beer, tries to let it settle his nerves.

“How you sleeping?” Hopper asks. Billy shrugs by way of answer, eyeing the poky room. He wonders if this is who Hopper wanted him to meet; surely not. She’s still looking at him in that round-eyed, unflinching way, and it makes the hair on the back of Billy’s neck go up. It reminds him of – it reminds him of how he’d feel when his dad was home and in a mood, like the air was crackling with static. It reminds him of being in that place, with that thing, the way it had towered over him, waiting to strike – waiting to –

That place – with those things – and the _girl_ –

“Easy, kid,” Hopper says, and Billy doesn’t get it until he realizes his legs have fallen away from under him, that he’s quivering from adrenaline and breaking out in sweat. “You’re okay. Sit down. You’re okay.” Hopper guides him into a chair, and Billy hates it, Billy wants to scream and punch and run, but his limbs won’t do what he’s telling them. He feels like a fucking child. “There are a handful of people who’ve spent time in that place,” Hopper continues, once he’s sat. “We’re some of them.”

The girl looks at him, her mouth turned up in a reassuring smile. Billy can feel himself shivering. “The guys at the lab,” Billy says, “They said – ”

Darkness crashes over the girl’s face like thunder. “Lying,” she says, and her voice is tight and angry. “They’re _lying_.”

“The less you know about it, the happier you’ll probably be,” Hopper adds, more gentle. “But you can ask us whatever you want.”

Billy looks at her. “What’s your name?” he asks hoarsely.

She smiles, and answers, “El.”

* * *

It shouldn’t bother him. Steve knows it fucking shouldn’t. He could have Tina, or Carol, or Stacey, or Savannah. But Steve doesn’t want them. He wants Nancy.

It’s two weeks to the day. Bullshit, he hears her say. You’re bullshit.

It’s not like he hasn’t heard it before. It’s not like between his tanking grades and his fleeting friendships it’s never occurred to him that he peaked in fucking junior high, that there’s no girl left in Hawkins that he hasn’t slept with or pissed off. He was old fucking news long before Billy Hargrove rode in.

But now here he is, alone and rotting in his big empty house while Billy’s off out somewhere getting his rocks off. When he’d said to Nancy that he was a better babysitter than a boyfriend, he’d expected her to crinkle up her eyes with sympathy, say _no, you were great, you brought me flowers, you were gonna take me to prom_ , any number of dumbass platitudes to make the moment any less colossally awful. But she didn’t.

Steve wonders if bringing Billy here had somehow been her smart idea. Steve Harrington, the pushover dumping ground for weirdos.

It’s a bad fucking move of Billy’s to come in through the back window, near-silent with what Steve suspects is a lifetime of practice. He nearly runs straight into Steve’s baseball bat, hefted up over his shoulder the moment he heard footsteps, jitteriness on steroids from the half-liter of liquor he’s necked. “Where the fuck have you been?” Steve snaps, once Billy’s let out a little yell of protest at the sight of him and Steve’s realized who the hell it is. Billy shrugs, palms spread, heading for the stairs; Steve follows him, furious. “I promised Hop – ”

“The fuck is this?” Billy interrupts, jolting to a halt in front of the heap of boxes Steve couldn’t be fucked to move.

“Max’s mom dropped them off,” Steve clarifies, tetchy, dropping the bat on top of the closest one. He can’t make anything of the look on Billy’s face. “Why can’t you go home?”

Billy schools his expression to something approaching calm. “I’m not one of your fucking strays, Harrington,” he says spitefully, making for the stairs.

Steve slips easily in front of him. “Why can’t you go home?” Steve asks again, each word over-slow and somehow threatening, like Billy’s a stupid child who’s been caught out misbehaving. Billy’s jaw sets. Something in Steve’s body is baying for blood. Bullshit, he hears Nancy say. You’re _bullshit_.

Then Billy tries to shove past, and it’s the perfect excuse to throw a punch. Fuck, it’s been a while since Steve got in a fight; he’s back in that headspace again, licked with adrenaline and breathing smoke. Billy dodges it like it’s nothing, squares his shoulders and makes to charge, but he catches his ankle on one of the boxes and loses his balance. Steve’s hand finds Billy’s shirt, grabs hold of Billy’s teetering momentum and uses it to shove him back against the wall.

Billy goes totally still. It’s like Steve’s found some kind of kill switch; for a moment he looks fucking terrified. “Put me down,” he says. His voice is tellingly calm.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Steve says back, equally flat. Billy spits onto Steve’s face; Steve swears, jerks back, doesn’t let go. “Fuck, you’re disgusting.”

Billy’s smile is feral. “Damn straight.” He tries to break Steve’s hold; Steve tightens his grip, slams him against the wall again – and in that second he shifts his footing, pushes Billy a half-inch to the right and not the left, straight into one of his parents’ stupid ornate picture frames.

It’ll haunt him later, how little noise Billy makes. It’s only the horrible crunch of the glass that clues Steve in; that, and the way Billy’s eyes go wide, looking at him like he’s finally said something Billy understands.

Steve trips over himself in his rush to step away. It’d be better if Billy came at him; but he doesn’t. He just tugs his shirt back into place and shoves past him to the bathroom down the hall.

Steve stares at the shards of glass in the hard electric light, glittering on the floor. The photo is from his parents’ wedding day, some unnamed great-aunt clutching teary-eyed at his mom. There had been blood, he thinks, blooming red on the back of Billy’s shirt. Steve feels like he can taste it on the back of his tongue.

Billy hasn’t shut the bathroom door. Steve can see him when he walks closer, leaning up against the sink, sweat plastering his hair to his face. The noise of Steve’s approach startles him; he yells, half-anger, half-fright, and kicks shut the door. “Fuck off,” Billy yells, muffled by the wood. His voice is tight with pain.

“Billy,” Steve says. “C’mon. Let me in.”

The door isn’t locked. The room stinks like meat. Billy looks like a strong breeze could tear him apart. His shirt is ripped at the back, scrunched and stuck wet to his skin, and there’s a sliver of glass jutting out to the right of his spine. “I told you to fuck off,” Billy says, but his voice is empty, threatless.

“There’s glass in your back,” Steve says. “We should – ”

“I can do it,” Billy snaps.

“Like fuck you can, you can’t even see it.”

Billy gives him a long, flat glare in the mirror above the sink. “So take it out,” he says.

Steve is not a fucking doctor; but he gets the impression that if he walks away, Billy’s going do something unbelievably stupid to himself. Billy watches in the mirror as Steve steps closer, peels up his shirt. It twists something strange in the pit of Steve’s gut, skimming his fingers across the slope of Billy’s skin. He’s warm, and solid, and Steve can feel the uneven push-pull of his breath. Between that and the tangy smell of his blood, he suddenly feels – real.

There’s a bunch of band-aids and antiseptic in the cupboard, tweezers in a makeup bag underneath the sink. “Ready?” Steve asks; Billy rolls his eyes, but the impatience feels performative. Fuck it, Steve thinks, grabs hold of the shard with the tweezers and pulls.

Billy lets out the edge of a ragged grunt, a low, keening whine. Like a dying dog. It’s somehow worse than a yell. There’s blood, but it’s only oozing, and he thinks with a rush of relief that they’re okay. Billy’s not going to bleed to death across the ugly avocado tiles. He makes a pretty atrocious job of patching him up, but Billy doesn’t complain, doesn’t make another sound. Billy twists to see Steve’s handiwork when he’s finished, eyes skimming down the reflection of his back.

“I promised I’d look after you,” Steve says, a little shaky. “The last time you went missing Max found you in the woods with a gun.”

Billy pauses, shifts his gaze to meet Steve’s eye. “I was with Hopper,” he answers, tone flat, defeated. “Next time I’ll call.”


	3. Chapter 3

Steve remembers a time when having a pool got him laid. Now it just gets him a handful of squealing tweens barreling through the house on a Saturday afternoon, jostling for the best bunk in the poolhouse and bickering over the pointlessness of swimcaps. 

They’re lined up along the edge, shivering in the freezing cold as heat twines up off the water, when Dustin spots Billy and shrieks. He points like he’s just seen a ghost, yells out “what in the name of – ?!”

“I told you he was staying here,” Max interrupts, throwing a spiteful look at Billy for having the temerity to step outside for a smoke.

“We did not think you were serious,” Mike adds, moving closer to Lucas. Billy affects an air of nonchalance, arms spread, and retreats around the other side of the house. “Dickhead,” Mike mutters, not quite under his breath.

Steve follows him. He isn’t sure why; but there’s been three days of détente since their last fight, and it’s a nicer place to live with Billy still on his side. He likes the quiet companionship, if he’s honest. Someone to smoke and eat with. Billy even helped him with his calculus homework the night before last.

The wind’s a lot sharper round here. They can just see the kids still, fuzzy round the edges with the heat rising off the water. It’s just Max and Lucas poolside now, beaming, shrieking every time the others splash them, avoiding the grabbing hands trying to drag them in.

“Do you even know what he would do if he caught them together?” Billy says suddenly.

Steve frowns. “Who?”

Billy doesn’t answer at first, sucking on the cigarette and blowing out a blue-gray cloud of it up towards the sky. “My dad – ”

“Your dad,” Steve interrupts, thick with disbelief. “That’s who you get all this shit from?”

“My dad was a cop,” Billy continues, ignoring him. “For a while, back in Sacramento. He saw – ”

“Save it,” Steve snaps, squaring his shoulders and stepping up to him to snatch the cigarette. “He didn’t see shit. Lucas is a great kid, and your dad’s a racist dick.”

He doesn’t wait to hear if Billy replies. He goes back by the pool, lounging in one of the deckchairs like an ersatz lifeguard. He feels duty-bound to keep a look out, partly because he’d only gotten Jonathan to fuck off by swearing he wouldn’t take his eyes off Will; that, and anyone being near the pool now makes him twitchy.

Max drops down in the chair next to him, watching the lazy trail of the cigarette back and forth. “Can I try?” she asks eventually. He gives her a look, then a tiny smile, and passes it across. She takes a drag, gags immediately at the taste, staring back at him with obvious disdain. “It’s disgusting,” she gasps out, once she’s done hacking up a lung.

“You get used to it,” he replies. He finishes the cigarette, stubs it out, and lights another.

“I don’t know how you can stand having him around all the time,” Max mutters. “Billy, I mean. He’s such a jackass.”

Steve looks at her. He wonders how not to make the question blunt, and then decides Max doesn’t strike him as someone who needs to be babied. “Does he hit you?” he asks.

Max is instantly confused. “What? No,” she says, her eyes trained on Lucas and Will’s hopelessly slow walking-race across the shallow end.

It doesn’t read like a lie. “Your mom?”

“Nope,” she says, shooting him a look like he’s being weird.

“So why can’t he go home?” Steve says; and Max – Max goes still. Max says nothing. Max shrugs, stands up, shoves her hands in her pockets and walks off without looking back.

Well, Steve thinks. That was fucking strange.

Between the five kids tearing round him and the three beers and the arrival of a substantial stack of pizzas, the world around Steve begins to fuzz around the edges. It stays that way through the cataclysm of flying limbs and cheese that marks them wolfing the food down, and it doesn’t jerk viciously back into focus until Mike sits up like a meerkat and says, suddenly, “Where’s Will?”

Steve immediately feels like he might throw up. Dustin, Mike, and Lucas tear off in different directions, or at least try to, falling foul of miscommunication as Mike and Lucas crash into each other and instantly start squabbling; Max, ever more sensible, bypasses them cleanly and heads straight for the window. “He’s by the pool,” she says, and Steve darts over to check. Sure enough, there Will is, sat by the edge and –

“Huh,” Steve says. Will’s talking to Billy. They’re a little smudgy in the low light, but there’s a soft look on Billy’s face Steve’s never seen before.

“Hey, dickhead!” Mike yells, thumping on the glass, and moment is broken. Will jerks back, clambers hurriedly to his feet; but Steve’s watching Billy, the way his face just resets in a second to indifferent, contemptuous, bored. “Leave him alone!”

“C’mon, Will,” Lucas says, opening the door and waving him over. “We wanna start the campaign.”

Worried Dustin might make good on his threat to explain what a dee-twenty is and desperate for the sharpness of fresh air, Steve leaves them to it and joins Billy at the side of the pool. “What were you talking to Will about?”

Billy shrugs. “Just stuff. He’s a good kid.”

“They’re all good kids,” Steve says, defensive, and the look Billy gives him is so fucking tired that Steve instantly regrets it.

In the morning they want to go to The Palace. Will calls his mom and gets the all-clear, and Steve’s just starting the argument about how it is absolutely not safe for all five of them to pile onto the back seat of his Bimmer when, almost out of nowhere, he remembers about Billy. “Finish your breakfast,” he says, cutting Lucas off mid-flow with a raised hand. “I’ll be right back.”

Steve hovers outside the guest room door, trying to judge whether or not Billy’s awake. He doesn’t strike him as an early riser. The wall outside is still neatly lined by a pile of boxes, carried upstairs by Steve out of sheer guilt yesterday morning.

 _I’m not one of your fucking strays_ , Steve thinks. He raises his hand and knocks.

It takes a minute, but eventually Billy opens up the door. “Yeah?” he asks, flat and irritated, kneading at his eye with the crux of his hand.

Steve leans up against the doorjamb. “Kids want a ride to the arcade,” he says. “You wanna go get something to eat?”

Billy nods. He looks bleary from sleep, soft in that odd way people are when they’ve just woken up. “I’ll be down,” he says, and shuts the door. Huh. Steve realizes he wasn’t expecting a yes.

The kids tussle briefly about who has to ride with Billy, dipping into seams of logic that might have spiraled on forever if it weren’t for Max cutting in to point out the longer they argued, the less time they actually got to game. There’s a diner with a parking lot right across the street from the arcade; they drop the kids, watch to make sure they go inside, and then park across the way.

Billy picks a seat by the window. He shrugs when Steve asks what he wants, so he orders them both waffles when the waitress comes round with the coffee. They sit in silence, Steve watching Billy watch the street, eyes flicking back ever so often to the arcade to look for the red flash of Max’s hair. It’s funny, Steve thinks. The way Billy holds himself, like he’s daring the world to start a fight he knows he’ll lose.

Billy thanks the waitress quietly when she comes with the plates, which earns him a smile. But Billy doesn’t see it; he’s looking back over Steve’s shoulder towards the door, and Steve can’t for the life of him decipher the expression on his face. Steve swivels in his seat to see, spots Tommy and a sophomore sidekick walking over to them. “Look at these two,” Tommy croons when he draws level with their booth. “Having breakfast together like a couple queers. What’s up, faggots?”

Only Steve notices the way heat flashes through Billy’s face, rising up into his cheeks. He wonders what it is; fear, maybe, or guilt. Or shame. “We’re eating waffles, dude,” Steve says flatly. “Nothing queer about waffles.”

Tommy rolls his eyes. “Whatever, man. We’re shooting hoops at four if you wanna come? Nelson’s gonna be there.”

Nelson is a two-bit asshole who sells them weed, or the closest you can get to it in this shithole of a town. Billy’s eyes are still on his food, actions slow and methodical. For some reason it feels important to Steve that he hasn’t said yes. “I dunno,” Steve says, stalling. “But my parents are still away all next weekend if you guys are down.”

Tommy grins sharklike, digging his elbow into the kid beside him in some warped gesture of enthusiasm. “Tight,” he answers. “I’ll get a keg.”

Steve waits for Tommy to leave before he speaks again. “You okay?”

Billy’s cutting up his waffle with the edge of his fork, carving out neat little squares full of syrup. “Fuck off, princess,” he says.

Jonathan promised to come get Will from The Palace, so Billy fucked off as soon as he’d finished eating, dropping a couple dollars towards the check. That left Steve alone killing time outside a kid’s arcade, but Steve’s had plenty practice with his own company lately. He’s getting accustomed to ignoring the weird looks.

He and Jonathan split the job down the middle, swapping polite greetings as Will, Mike, and Lucas climb into Jonathan’s car and Steve has to bite the inside of his cheek very hard not to ask if he’s seen much of Nancy lately. He’s mercifully distracted by Dustin, who is hopping around excitedly and demanding they watch some rare John Carpenter movie Jonathan’s managed to find for them on VHS later in the week; and apparently, it has to be at Steve’s. Their argument, which is probably true, is that none of their parents would ever let them watch it. Steve isn’t sure that means he should, but fuck it. At least at his he can keep an eye on them.

Steve drops Dustin before Max, which means it’s just the two of them cruising down Cherry Lane, like before. She makes him pull up two blocks from the house; but she doesn’t get out. She sits for a while with her hands shoved in her jacket pockets, scowling into the middle distance and chewing her lip. Steve lets the engine idle; it’s way too damn cold to turn the heater off.

“His dad hits him,” Max says, breaking the silence like a thunderclap. “Billy. They think I don’t know, but I do.”

Steve stares at her. “Jesus Christ.” Horror forms like a lump of lead, deep in the pit of Steve’s chest, as everything clicks slowly into place. “Shit.”

“Don’t tell him I said anything,” she mutters, opening the car door. “And don’t pity him. He doesn’t deserve it.”

Steve jumps out of his skin at a short rap on the car window. It’s only Nancy; but it’s easy enough to blame his jitteriness on the existential horror of Mondays. He’d been sat parked outside of school for at least five minutes. He wonders if she’s been watching him, running through her argument over and over in her head the way he used to do. Steve sucks in a breath, lets it out as a sigh, and slowly winds the window down. “Yeah?”

“Can I talk to you for a second?” she asks, and Steve shrugs, gesturing across at the passenger side. He watches in the mirror as she hesitates at the back of the car to smooth down her skirt. It makes something ache in the pit of his chest. “I got a call from Barb’s mom last night,” she continues, once she’s settled inside. “She wanted to make sure we were okay because we hadn’t been round in a while. The sale is about to go through.”

“Okay,” Steve says slowly. “So what do you want me to do about it?”

Irritation flickers across her face. “Don’t – do you even care?”

That rankles. “I don’t know, Nancy,” he says flatly. “Do I?”

“God, you are such an asshole,” she snaps, flopping back against the car seat. “So I dumped you. Grow up.”

Steve’s jaw clenches. He’s in no mood to be kind. “Jesus. You know what? Fuck that. You said me loving you was bullshit, Nance, and you never even apologized after. I think I’m entitled to be an asshole about that.” He holds up his hand as she instantly opens her mouth, adds, “It doesn’t count if I had to ask you for it.”

She squirms a little, tripping her fingers over each other on her lap. “Jonathan and I are working on something,” she says after a beat, voice wavering a little on his name. The sound alone makes Steve want to get blackout drunk. “Something that’ll get the Hollands closer to the truth.”

Steve grits his teeth. “So?”

“So,” Nancy says back, glancing at him nervously, “Can you drop by and try to stall them?”

I didn’t kill her, Steve wants to say. I didn’t even fucking want her there. I didn’t tell her to sit outside and get dragged off into the woods by some monster I didn’t fucking know existed, some monster I still wish I didn’t know about, some monster that still makes me keep a light on after dark. “I,” Steve begins, and then gives up. “Sure.”

Relief flashes palpably across Nancy’s face, followed by a smile that it would at one time have thrilled him to see. “Thanks,” she says softly, reaching for his hand, but he’s already turned away, opening the door. She climbs out too, hurries to match his pace as he takes off towards school. “Is it true Billy’s staying with you?”

Steve cuts her a look. “What’s it to you?” he asks, over-sharp.

“Nothing,” she says quickly, flushing a little. “I just – he’s kind of a dickhead. And he beat the crap out of you.”

“You’re sweet,” Steve mutters, already sick to the back fucking teeth, holding the door open for her when they reach the main building. “But I can handle myself.”

* * *

The fan in the corner of the room is whirring chuk-a-chuk-a constantly. Billy wishes they didn’t keep doing this in rooms so ice-bright-white they make his head hurt.

“Your bloods are clean,” the doctor says, idly flipping through his chart. Billy wonders what the fuck he even knows to look for. “Have you experienced any emotional problems this week? Mood swings?”

“Bite me,” Billy says.

The doctor hums under his breath. “The police chief told us he found you in the woods with a gun. Would you describe yourself as a violent person, Mr. Hargrove?”

_What did we talk about?_

Billy swallows. “I wasn’t gonna hurt anybody,” he says hoarsely. “I knew – I knew what it wanted. What it wanted me to do.”

“And what was that?”

 _Respect and responsibility_.

Billy shakes his head. He can’t put it into words, that vitriolic, roiling hate, that compulsion to kill and destroy. He could’ve given in. He came so fucking close to giving in. Then he saw his dad’s gun, and came up with another solution. It’s not like he hadn’t thought about it before.

The doctor clears his throat, irritated by Billy’s intractability. “Did it have a voice?”

Billy feels himself flush. He knows what he must sound like, how fucking mental he must seem. He shakes his head again, sinking down a little further in his chair. “It was just a feeling,” he says.

* * *

The house is still and quiet when Steve gets back, but he can see the vague flickering of the fire pit in the back yard when he walks through to the kitchen. It’s weird; he finds himself strangely relieved that Billy’s around. Steve helps himself to leftover pizza from the fridge, grabs a couple beers and steps out back to join him.

He recognizes the dank, heavy smell of weed the moment he steps into the yard, and for a minute it feels like divine fucking intervention. Billy’s wrapped up by the fire as he smokes, back to the woods and eyes on the house; he raises the joint as Steve reaches him, and Steve unashamedly groans with pleasure, taking it and sinking into the next chair.

“I have had,” Steve says, after taking a long, heady drag and letting the warmth of it sit in his chest, “the _worst_ fucking day.”

Marsha Holland had cried twice. Steve had had to pull over on the way home to throw up. But Billy doesn’t ask; and honestly, Steve’s kind of grateful for it. “Last of the stash from Cali,” he murmurs instead, taking back the joint.

Steve grins. “What, was it hidden in your Bible?”

Billy smiles back shyly, soft round the edges. “Something like that,” he admits.

The buzz is beginning to hit, smoothing out all the hard lines in his body, dragging away all the pent-up stress. Steve takes a loose pull of his beer, hears himself ask, “Do you know about Barbara Holland?”

Billy frowns. “The missing girl?”

“She’s not missing,” Steve says quietly. “She’s dead. Those things got her, right here.” He stabs his beer bottle towards the pool. “Her parents are selling up to hire a PI. They think there’s still hope.”

“That’s fucked up,” Billy murmurs. He looks strange in the firelight, weirdly gaunt. “My folks probably wouldn’t even bother looking.”

 _His dad hits him_ , Steve hears Max say. _They think I don’t know, but I do_.

“Max’s mom did,” Steve points out, hesitant.

Billy shakes his head. “She went looking for Max. She just found me. And even when she did, she ended up – ”

Billy cuts himself off, takes a long drag on the joint, but the guilt and misery is slow enough even for Steve to see. He remembers in a mortified, squirming rush how all of them had crowded round in the Byers’ house and instantly dismissed the idea of saving Billy. It doesn’t make him feel much better that Jonathan fucking Byers had been the one dissenting voice.

Heavy black cloud hangs low on the horizon; the wind is picking up speed. Even sat by the fire Steve can tell it must be threatening to drop below twenty. There’s only a couple tokes left on the blunt, and Billy peers at the stub in the flickering firelight and sighs. “Fuck, I miss Cali.”

“You gonna go back?” Steve asks; Billy lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “My dad wants me to go to college over there,” he says. “Fucking Berkeley or Stanford or some shit. He’s in total denial about how awful my grades are. I’ll be lucky to walk at graduation.”

Billy’s eyes are sharp. “So that’s when daddy gets out his checkbook, right?”

“I don’t want him to,” Steve confesses, quiet against the still night air like his parents might be able to hear him from two hundred miles away. “What about you?”

Billy’s jaw clenches, like the question is an insult somehow; Steve hadn’t meant it to be. “I don’t feel like I have a lot of options,” he mutters, after a beat.

“You must want something.”

“I want to get a job,” Billy admits. “Get some money. Not for me. For Max.”

Steve hesitates. “You can’t just fix it with money,” he says.

Billy nods. “I know,” he says, level. “But there’s gonna come a time when she wants out of this. Out of here, away from him. And when that happens, I want to make it easy for her. It never was for me.”

Steve frowns, puzzled. “What about you? Don’t you want...?”

“He’s my dad,” he says with a shrug.

Bullshit, Steve thinks. “You don’t have to stay around just because he lost your mom.”

Billy’s mouth twists up in something like a smile, but there’s no humor in his eyes. “She isn’t dead,” he says, after a moment. “She left.”

Steve stares at him. “What?”

“She took off.” The question hangs unasked in the air: _she left you behind?_ Billy smiles. “Reminded her of him, I guess,” he says.

The thunderclap rolls long and low, and Steve wakes up screaming. The house around him is black, pitch black, and there are monsters in every corner of his fucking room, gibbering and swaying towards him in each flash of light. He falls out of bed, gropes for the bat, finds it isn’t there, finds the light won’t turn on, scrabbles for the doorhandle, flees half-choking into the corridor – runs into Billy, tries to shove past him, to warn him, to something, hears himself yell, “I need, Dustin, I need a phone – ”

Thunder bellows through the house again, and Steve’s pretty sure he’s not breathing. Billy’s got hold of his wrists, and Steve wants to kick and scream and thrash in anger and panic and fear. “The kids are fine,” Billy says, his voice foolishly gentle, like Steve’s –

– like Steve’s being crazy –

Doubt, just for a second, blazes white-hot through Steve’s mind. “You don’t know that,” Steve says hoarsely, twisting again to try and get out of his grip.

“I do,” Billy answers, slow and calm. “They’re okay, Steve. Have you got a flashlight? Candles?” Steve knows he should be answering, but he’s still coiled round, staring back towards his room to see where those _things_ went – the hallway sparks up vivid in the lightning again, and Steve hears himself cry out in terror as they lurch out of the darkness –

Billy takes hold of his hand. “C’mon,” he says, and something in the softness of his voice and his touch begins to still the mad clatter of his heartbeat. “Come with me.”

Steve does. Billy leads him downstairs like a child, sits him down in front of the fireplace in the lounge and sets it alight, warmth and light spilling out into the dark, echoing room. Steve realizes he’s shaking, palms shoved into his eyes hard enough to make him see stars. “Talk to me,” Billy says quietly, lowering Steve’s hands from his face in a way that’s unfathomably gentle. “Breathe slow. Tell me what you can see.”

Steve opens his eyes. “The fire,” he says after a beat, voice rough. “You. My, my hands – ”

A blue-white flash tears through the room, and Steve’s mind spirals away into panic. “Keep going,” Billy murmurs, watching him closely. “What’s the fire like?”

“Hot,” Steve says, feeling unbelievably dumb, but Billy just nods his approval. “Smells like – ” Thunder outside booms, and Steve flinches, the ringing in his ears like a firework’s gone off right beside him. “ – I don’t know – ”

“Breathe slow. Tell me what color it is.”

Steve breathes in and out, deep and deliberate, shaky but measured. “Orange,” he forces out, making himself look at the flames. “Red, yellow. Green at the edges.”

“Good,” Billy answers, and Steve glances back at him and realizes he’s okay. He’s calm, he’s safe, he’s okay. “Good,” Billy says again, able somehow to read his newfound composure in his face. “You want some water?”

Steve nods. It feels like Billy’s an eternity in the kitchen, but the thunder rolls twice while he’s gone and it’s okay, it’s okay, Steve no longer feels like death is coming right at him from every corner of the room when it does. “How did you know what to do?” Steve asks quietly once he’s back, downing half the glass of water in an instant and cradling the rest against his chest.

“My mom taught me,” Billy answers, dropping down blankets and pillows right by the fire. He’s so casual when he says it, like that aptitude really means nothing at all. “Power’s still out. Figured we could sleep down here?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, after a moment. He’s too fucking shaken to remember why not. “Okay.” 

Steve wakes to the warm smell of coffee and instantly feels like a fool. He’s lying in a line by the fire, still giving off heat but flickering and spurting itself out; Billy’s blankets, by contrast, are cool to the touch. Fuck, what in the goddamn hell must Billy think of him. The way he’d spoken to him had been –

– tender, cautious, gentle –

– like he was a fucking child.

“Here,” Billy says, appearing without warning with a mug. Steve takes it gratefully, trying to avoid catching his eye. “I’m gonna take a shower and head. Don’t want people asking why we’re arriving at school together.”

Steve nods, failing to knead some of the drowsiness out of his eyes. He’d almost forgotten that Billy went to his school in the first place. “See you there,” he says.

Tommy, Carol, and Nicole are all waiting by Steve’s locker like usual; but this time Billy’s there too, smiling filthily as he drawls out his inane cover story of auditioning for porn in LA. There’s a lot of eye-rolling and scoffs, but to no real depth; they all seem to want it to be true. His smile shifts when he sees Steve coming, in a tiny, fleeting way that Steve can’t identify. By the time Steve’s drawn level, he’s transmuted it into a nod and a grunt, almost empty of sentiment.

Not empty enough. “Look at you two, making nice,” Tommy snickers, jostling Billy’s arm. “He your fluffer on set, Hargrove?”

“Not necessary,” Billy sneers, grin wolfish but empty. It seems so obvious to Steve now, the thin fragility of that veneer, how conjured it all is. 

The bell goes. Steve just about masters a flinch. “Later,” Tommy says, and they file away one by one. Billy doesn’t say another word, but he cuts Steve a look, brushes their shoulders together as he turns.

 _You good?_ , he’s asking. Steve nods, smiles a little. “Later,” he says.

It’s hardly the first time Steve’s had a shitty night and his brain has checked out of paying attention by ten a.m., but it feels different somehow. He sits in class with his chin in his hand and watches the snow drift down in silent, even layers across the pitch, and thinks about Billy. How different he is when he smiles, how patient he’d been with him the night before. He’s like a different person, a tangled smokebomb of a human being Steve doesn’t feel like he understands at all. Maybe it’s like what Nancy saw in him, all those months ago. That capacity for kindness and change.

“Hey, earth to Harrington,” Tommy sneers, kicking him hard in the shin. They’re sat in the cafeteria, the whole school crammed in tight to avoid the cold, and apparently Steve zoning out has made him lose his temper. “I asked you a question. Jesus, you’re in a different fucking world today.”

“Sorry,” Steve mumbles, blinking hard and trying to drag himself back. “Didn’t sleep much.”

“Yeah?” Tommy says, grinning wicked and assuming the lewdest, and Steve echoes it weakly. Billy’s sat next to Tommy, leaning back in his chair and looking totally bored, his restless, twisted energy penned in. He’s staring at Steve, but Steve daren’t catch his eye. “So we on or what?”

Steve blinks. “What?”

Tommy’s jaw clenches. “This weekend,” he says, over-slow and tight.

“Oh. Yeah.” He never asked Billy about that. It still feels important that he does, somehow. “I dunno.”

Tommy scoffs. “Fuck, you’ve been hopeless since Wheeler ditched you.” He stands up; Carol and Nicole, ever the loyal lieutenants, get up onto their feet too. “If you ever manage to pull her dick out of your ass, the keg’s ready to go.”

Steve watches him leave. He realizes in a distant, abstract way that he really doesn’t give a flying fuck about following him. “You okay?” Billy asks quietly, once they’re alone.

Steve allows himself a smile. “Fuck off, princess,” he murmurs, and something twists warm and heavy in his chest when Billy smiles back.

The snow’s thick and sludgy underfoot by the time school’s out, soaking through Steve’s sneakers as he crosses to his car. Too rough for a run, he thinks, and the realization makes him irritated, wound up with energy that has nowhere to go.

The blankets are still tangled up in front of the fire when he gets back; Steve spots them, drops his keys on the sofa, and decides immediately to clean the whole house from top to bottom.

Billy finds him a couple hours later doing laundry. He stands in the doorway and watches Steve with frank curiosity, and it’s times like this that make Steve wonder how many other eighteen-year-old-boys know their way around a washer and dryer. He had to learn a long time ago, when his nanny became a hindrance and his mom’s company moved their office from Indianapolis to Chicago. Having Billy there starts to build up something jumpy in Steve’s stomach, nervous and tetchy, like he’s forgotten to do something or he’s folding wrong. “You want something?” he asks, blunt.

For a moment, Billy’s wholly impassive. Then he tilts his head and asks, equally bluntly, “Do you want me to sleep in your room tonight?”

“Oh.” Steve’s skin crawls, heat twisting up through his body and breaking out into an actual blush on his face. Jesus, how mortifying. He knows Billy doesn’t mean anything by it, but it feels like he’s saying he needs a babysitter, like he might wet the fucking bed. “No, no, it’s – I’m good.”

Billy nods once. “Night, then,” he says, and goes.

Steve stares at the door, closed shut in Billy’s wake. Fuck, he’s too tired for this; but when he gets into bed he can’t sleep. The world around him is silent, endlessly so, not even a breeze to bat around the branches of the trees outside. No reason whatsoever for lying there feeling like he’s plugged directly into a current, tense and buzzing beneath his skin.

He gets up, sits on the side of his bed for what feels like hours, struggling to work out what the fuck he’s trying to do. Billy, a little voice seems to say. Go see Billy. So Steve stands up, walks into the hallway and knocks.

Billy instantly looks worried. “Harrington?” he asks, rough with sleep and peering out into the light, looking him over to check he’s okay.

Steve wets his lips. It’s quarter before eleven on a Tuesday night and Billy’s standing here in front of him, all pointed lines and sloping curves. Steve feels this jitter-pull down in the base of his gut, like he’s fourteen at a party and he’s alone with some girl.

Electricity, he thinks.

“Steve,” Billy says, gentle and hoarse, and Steve steps forward and kisses him.

Billy jerks away instantly, reeling like he’s been punched, and Steve thinks he might throw up. He faced demogorgons with less fear than this. “I’m – ” he starts, clumsily, but Billy instantly cuts him off.

“The fuck did Max say?”

He’s trembling, Steve realizes. He stares at him dumbly, spun out and confused. “What?”

Billy’s eyes go wide. The silence between them seems endless, the air itself twisted up and charged. “Shit,” Billy says softly, in time, then he shoves him against the wall and kisses him back, hands twisting up in Steve’s hair.

King Steve has made out with a lot of people, charmed his way into a lot of lingerie. None of it ever felt remotely like this. It’s not just how rough Billy is, his nails against his scalp and his movements harsh, chasing what he wants with pragmatic bluntness as he pushes Steve back against the wall. It’s not just the burn-scrape of his stubble against Steve’s skin, or the fact that Steve can feel the outline of his dick through his sweatpants like a brand against his thigh.

It’s not just that he can’t pretend it’s a girl. It’s that he doesn’t want to.

He’s fucking feverish with want. Steve gets his hand up the soft line of Billy’s shirt, searching for skin, and the small little stutter that bleeds out of Billy’s mouth when he does makes him feel reckless, exultant. It doesn’t matter in that moment that Steve’s never touched another guy’s dick in his life, because when he dips below his waistband and takes him in hand Billy groans and it’s the best goddamn noise in the universe. Steve’s dizzy with it, high on the sight of Billy’s blown eyes and his wrecked little pants and the acrid smell of his sweat, gathering in the dip of his throat. Steve leans in to taste and Billy whines, fucking up into his hand; it doesn’t seem to matter much that he’s the one with his back to the wall, boxed in by Billy, surrounded by him. Billy’s still looking at him in this open, desperate, vulnerable way that makes Steve’s skin crawl with triumph and desire and power.

Billy’s breath is shifting, this high little hitching whine bleeding into the soft end of each in-and-out, and Steve thinks he can figure out what that means. Steve leans up again and kisses him, relishes the way Billy’s hand finds its way back into his hair and pulls, and he might be imagining it but it feels a lot less like retribution and a lot more like Billy’s just looking for something to hold onto. Billy’s cock kicks in his hand and Steve thinks yes, fuck, c’mon, give it to me –

Billy’s silent when he comes, dropping forward onto Steve in one hard slump. Steve’s hand gentles on his dick, coaxing him through it, dropping scattershot kisses along the side of Billy’s face where he can reach. He’s so fucking warm.

Eventually, he’s done. It’s weirdly more intimate, having Billy leant up against him in the silence of the hallway, still shivering a little as Steve runs his now-free hand gently up and down his spine. His own arousal is starting to bleed into his consciousness, how fucking hard he is against Billy’s stomach, the both of them wet and sticky with Billy’s come in a way that makes any tiny movement torture; but it feels almost like he’s got Billy under some kind of spell he’s loath to break.

Billy breaks it for him. He turns his head towards Steve’s neck, bites hard enough to bruise, pulls back with a quick wickedness in his eyes and then drops to his knees.

“Oh, fuck,” Steve says, more of a moan than actual words. It’s been a good year since anybody sucked him off, and it’s pretty damn clear from the moment Billy takes him into his mouth that he knows what he’s doing, tonguing the soft spot just shy of the head as he rakes his nails ever-so-gentle down the shaft and back towards his balls. His mouth is so fucking warm, yielding but just the right side of tight, and Steve knows he’s so wound up and heady with it that he’s going to last all of thirty seconds.

Worse, infinitely fucking worse is when he grabs hold of Steve’s hand and shoves Steve’s fingers into his hair. Steve groans, feeling the way that Billy instantly accommodates to the rhythm he sets, the way he pushes his head back encouragingly and hums out his approval. Steve’s fingers tighten on reflex and Billy’s nails dig in hard just below his ass and it’s too fucking much, that twisted mix of pain and pleasure, the way Billy slopes a look up at him from underneath his eyelashes as he jerks his wrist and takes Steve in far enough that he hits the back of Billy’s throat.

He feels his orgasm building, twisted up tight, rumbling through the edges of him before it builds in a tight, hot spiral at his core. He’s fucking Billy’s mouth with these tense, hard thrusts that must hurt, must be too rough, but Billy doesn’t give a shit, Billy’s chasing the motion and pushing back into his hand and moaning wetly around his dick and Steve wants to fucking ruin him, wants to be ruined by him, wants in a desperate, rolling, endless way he’s never felt with any girl before.

“Oh,” Steve says, right as the crested wave of it all hits, “Oh _fuck_ ,” and comes.

They sit there together in silence, backs against the wall and breathing hard. They’re close, pressed up against one another, warmth bleeding between their bodies as Steve comes down from the high. Something’s shifting, so monumental and terrifying that Steve can’t look at it, can only think about how good it feels to have Billy up against his side.

Billy suddenly barks out a laugh, humorless and empty. Then he gets up off the floor, walks back into his room, and shuts the door without looking back.


	4. Chapter 4

Steve’s not dumb. Hawkins might be in the middle of assfuck Indiana, but it’s not Mars. He’s heard plenty stories of horny friends on summer camps giving each other a reach-around, stupid drinking games that get way out of hand. But neither of them had been anything remotely approaching drunk. And Steve’s done his fair share of making out with strangers for the hell of it, and he knows with absolute certainty that it’s not usually like – _that_.

It’s weird, Steve thinks. He’s staring down the barrel of being a faggot and it’s way more fucking frightening than dueling with some monster holding only a baseball bat.

He doesn’t think there’s a word for what he is. He misses Nancy, misses the gentle softness of her perfume and the slope of her breasts and the way she’d shuddered when he fucked into her. He knows some guys take a while to work out they’re queer, but he’s sure he really likes girls. But then he remembers the hard bite of Billy’s hipbones against his palms and how heavy and hot his dick had felt against him and he knows, on this deep, instinctual level that it hadn’t just been some drunk one-off or an aesthetic camaraderie. He wants to make Billy come in the way he used to think about making Nancy come.

Billy’s long gone by the time Steve drags himself out of bed, long enough for the neat patch on the driveway he cleared of snow to already be covered with a fresh sheen. Steve doesn’t read too much into it; it’s not unusual for him to be the last one out of the house. There are still only a handful of people in the corridors by the time Steve does get into school, the others caught up by the snowstorm or too lazy to come in the day before Thanksgiving.

Steve checks Billy’s usual smoking spot, comes up empty, then backtracks to the nearest restroom when he remembers what a prissy bitch Billy is about being in the cold. Sure enough, Billy’s inside, wearing about forty jumpers and scowling at the universe, cigarette in hand. He tries to play it cool when Steve walks in, but he’s not quick enough; Steve sees with jittery delight the way his eyes go wide, just like they had the night before.

Steve takes the cigarette, sucks on it once, stubs it out against the wall and drops it into the trashcan. “I wasn’t done with that,” Billy says, voice flat and eyes glittering, and Steve presses him up against the wall and kisses him, hot and dirty and slow. Billy shoves him away, flush high on his cheeks, but there’s no one there, no one there to see and judge but him and Steve, and Steve sure as fuck isn’t judging. “Unbelievable,” Billy mutters, grabs him by the shirt and shoves him into the end stall.

With a girl, Steve’d go slow and gentle. Murmur in her ear about how he can’t stop thinking about her, come prepared with some pretty trinket to loop around her wrist. He kind of wants to with Billy, too, wants to tell him how he’s driving Steve fucking crazy, but he can’t get the words out before Billy’s biting at his neck and his jaw and his mouth, cupping him through his jeans and grinding hard with the heel of his palm. Steve reaches over to do likewise, gets his fingers on Billy’s zipper and tugs it down, movements frantic with the desire to get Billy’s dick in his hand again. Billy makes this noise when he finally does, a half-swallowed sigh, just like he had before. He wants to make Billy make that noise every moment for the rest of his life. Fuck, it’s addicting.

Steve starts to move his hand, low, lazy tugs of his wrist that make Billy’s eyelids flutter. Last night had been so quick, so rushed; Steve burns with the need to take his time, to find out what Billy likes, to eke out every scrap of pleasure he can from Billy’s skin. Not that he can here; but later, he thinks, and his blood sings with the promise of it. Billy reaches up, winds his fingers into Steve’s hair and pulls, just a little, enough to send a shiver coursing through his spine, enough to press their foreheads together and leave them close, Billy’s breath warm against his cheek.

The door opens. Both of them go completely still. Steve actually winces when he hears Tommy say, “That you, Harrington? I can see your ugly backpack.”

“Kinda busy here, dickshit,” Steve shouts back through the door, his palm pressed over Billy’s mouth. He can feel Billy’s jackrabbiting pulse, the way he’s trembling up against him. Heady and reckless, Steve slowly, gently, begins to move his hand again.

Billy’s eyes fly wide and he grabs for Steve’s wrist, but even when he gets a grip on it he doesn’t pull him off. “Looking for Hargrove,” Tommy continues, and Billy strangles down a whimper, writhing for a second like he can’t decide whether to press closer or get away. “You seen him?”

“Who am I, his fucking babysitter?” Steve says, jerking Billy lazily. He can see Tommy through the crack in the door, over by the sinks and looking himself over for zits. “Check the bleachers. He’s probably getting his dick sucked,” Steve says, and Billy’s head snaps back and he comes, shivering, clenching up hard against him.

“Finish her off quick,” Tommy says, apparently satisfied with his inspection. “If you get written up for tardiness again your daddy’s gonna freak.”

Tommy goes. The door clicks shut audibly behind him. There’s this long, aching moment where he and Billy just stare at one another, Billy’s dick still softening in Steve’s hand, and then Billy snarls, gets out from under him and shoves Steve back against the toilet, hard. “Don’t fucking ever try that shit with me again,” Billy spits, tugging off his stained sweater and dumping it into the trash.

Steve lets him go. The bell’s already rung; he’ll get written up for tardiness anyway.

He doesn’t see Billy again until gym. Any other week that wouldn’t be weird, and honestly Steve isn’t totally sure it is weird now, hasn’t been sure of a goddamn fucking thing for the past week and a half. He can’t believe it’s only been ten days since Hopper rocked up at five a.m. and deposited Billy like a package at his door.

Billy ignores him in the locker room except to shoulder-check him into a wall. Steve doesn’t rise to it, bites his tongue and tugs his jersey on, but when he walks over to the mirror to fuss with his hair he realizes he’s fucking covered in Billy’s bitemarks. Well, shit, Steve thinks, even as the sight twists something hot and potent in the base of his gut.

The low scoop neck is doing him no fucking favors. A couple guys whistle; more than one jostles him rougher than they should when they start to play, leering and talking shit as they do. “Damn, she’s an animal,” Tommy cackles, scooting forward and trying to slap the ball away. “C’mon, give us her number.”

“Sharing is caring, Harrington,” another voice shouts across the court, and Steve loses possession to flip him off. Billy stalks round and round, knocks him to the floor three times, and doesn’t say a goddamn thing.

It’s their last class of the day, so most of his classmates hotfoot it out the locker room as soon as they’re showered and changed; not Billy, though. He makes a big show of taking his time, hustling and boasting about some date he’s got set up. “Don’t want to be on time,” he says smoothly through a toothy smile. “Gets them desperate, you know?”

So then it’s just him and Steve, toweling off together in the empty silence while Billy’s avoiding his eye. Standing with his back to him, Steve sees the neat, thin line running by his spine; jesus, Steve had forgotten all about it. It’s hardly unique. Some of the scars around it are older, older than a month. Looking at them makes Steve want to tear Neil Hargrove’s throat out.

Billy turns round and Steve looks away, too slow to be subtle. He’s still wearing his jersey when Billy walks towards him, gets him up against the lockers, and when Billy’s fingers press against one of the marks on his throat Steve’s knees go completely weak.

There’s no one around. Billy’s so close, and solid, and warm. Steve wets his lips. “What was that about having a date?” he asks.

“Shut the fuck up,” Billy murmurs, sinking to his knees.

It’s barely a quarter after nine in the morning and Billy’s already sucked him off. It’s basically lining up to be Steve’s best Thanksgiving yet, even if his parents couldn’t be fucked to make the three hour drive from Chicago. Steve really doesn’t care; it gives him the chance to soak in the feeling of having Billy sprawled out beneath him as Steve pays him back, still experimenting with which tight little jerks of his hand manage to tease a whine out from between Billy’s clenched teeth.

Without his parents home, dinner can be whatever the fuck they want it to be. They opt for breakfast food, immediately arguing over whether or not cinnamon goes into the pancake batter and how they cook the eggs, but there’s no heat to it. Billy’s perched up on the countertop as Steve minds the stove, peering skeptically at the simmering eggs, and Steve takes the opportunity to slide between Billy’s open legs and reach up to kiss him, lazy and slow.

Billy goes still, pulls away. “There’s a car in the drive,” he says.

“Yeah, dumbass,” Steve says, rolling his eyes, “it’s mine.”

“No, I mean – ”

Then Steve hears keys in the door, and his face splits wide into a smile. “Holy shit,” Steve breathes, and flees out of the kitchen.

He practically bowls his mom over, throwing himself at her before she gets the chance to put down her bag. They haven’t pulled anything like this since he was a kid, a real kid, and Steve’s so happy he could burst with it. “Of course we came home,” his dad says, reaching over to shake his hand, “It’s your last Thanksgiving,” and Steve’s good mood drops like a stone. College, he thinks. Right.

The sound of Billy making breakfast filters through the empty silence, and his mom’s face pulls into a scowl. “Do you have a girl here?” she asks, heading towards the kitchen as she unties her scarf. “Stephen, we talked about this – ”

Billy walks out of the kitchen. Steve thanks several deities that he’s managed to deal with his just-fucked hair and find a shirt. “Billy Hargrove, ma’am,” Billy says, holding out his hand for her to shake.

It’s his dad’s turn to frown. “Neil Hargrove’s boy?” he asks, and Steve hopes he’s the only one who notices Billy flinches.

“Sorry for intruding, sir,” Billy answers smoothly. “I’ll be right on my way.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Steve’s mom says, breezily. “Ignore my husband’s manners.” She looks him over. “You should probably go get dressed, though.”

Billy drops a half-sketched bow and heads towards the hall. Steve’s dad waits long enough for Billy to definitely be out of earshot, and then turns to his mother and says, “Marie, sweetheart, count the silverware.”

“Dad,” Steve snaps, before he can school his voice calm. “It’s okay, honestly. He’s going through a rough time and Hop asked me to keep an eye on him.”

If anything this makes it worse. “Hopper?” his dad echoes thinly. “ _Police Chief_ Hopper?”

Steve clenches his jaw. “I swear it’s fine,” he says.

“Brian,” Marie chides, walking through to the kitchen and dumping their half-made breakfast into the bin without a thought. “He probably doesn’t have anyplace else to go.”

Steve’s mom hijacks him into chopping vegetables before he has the chance to flee, so he doesn’t get a chance to get Billy aside and ask if he’s really okay with staying through a Harrington family holiday. It’s not that Steve wants him to go; he just knows what his parents are like. But Billy’s all charm and good manners when he comes back downstairs, wearing what passes for respectable in his mismatched wardrobe. He’s even brushed his goddamn hair. Billy helps his mom with the cooking while Steve lays the table, and he radiates nothing but respectability with a sharp edge of glamour. It kills Steve a little to see it, to see him walking around wearing another person’s skin.

Eventually they settle down around the table, this enormous mahogany thing in a big empty room they only ever use on Thanksgiving and Pesach, and his mom serves the rib-eye roast his dad always insists on. The food’s all served; his parents have even given them both a glass of the rich red diligently paired with the beef. It smells amazing, but Steve’s twitchy, nervous, and the thought of eating it makes his mouth twist sour.

He’s being dumb. Billy is totally fine, loading up his plate and complimenting his mom on everything he can think of, from the carrots to the table settings. He’s flirting, Steve realizes, with that full-on megawatt charm he’s seen him use a hundred times on girls across Hawkins. And his mom’s falling for it, all genteel blushes and demurred replies.

His dad looks decidedly less convinced. He’s got his poker-face on, seemingly immune to Billy’s best attempts at beguiling him as he waits for his turn with the vegetables. It’s making Steve worry; his mom is unlikely to start a fight at the table, but his dad is another matter. “You moved here what, three months ago?” Marie asks, either ignorant of or ignoring outright Brian’s thin-eyed stare as she passes Billy the potatoes.

“Something like that,” Billy agrees. “From California.”

Brian makes a short noise of approval. “Are you going back there for college?”

Billy ducks his head. “Actually, sir,” he says, “I was thinking of enlisting.”

Steve knocks over his water glass. Fucking what? “You don’t strike me as having the discipline for the army,” Brian says.

Billy smiles humorlessly. “You sound like my dad.”

“He a military man?”

“No, sir,” Billy murmurs. “A cop.” His smile twists a little. “Or at least he used to be.”

“You didn’t make it sound like a compliment,” his father says, after a pause.

Billy blinks. “Sir?”

“When you said I was like your father.”

“Brian,” Marie chides, voice flat, bored.

Billy fidgets a little in his seat, nervous. “I’m sorry, sir,” he says. “I didn’t mean any offence.”

“You’re fine, Billy,” Marie insists, topping up his wine. “Tell us more about California.”

They’re not even in town for one night only; Steve’s still helping Billy with the dishes when he notices that his dad is loading up the car. It’s hard not to feel the usual wrench of disappointment, that winding realization he’s losing them again. Steve hates how childish it always makes him feel to stand on the doorstep and watch them drive away with a nebulous ache in his chest.

His mom kisses him on the cheek when they’re ready to go, washing Steve over with the cool, familiar scent of her perfume. “He seems like a good kid,” she says when she pulls away, preening Steve’s hair to her satisfaction. “But he’s got to want you to help him.”

Steve finds Billy out back, sucking lazily on a cigarette and staring out at the darkness. They stand in silence together for a time, both eyes on the treeline, movements tight and shoulders raised. He suspects Billy’s nonchalance is as much of an act as his is. “Sorry about them,” he says.

Billy shrugs, smiles just a little. “That was nowhere near my shittiest Thanksgiving,” he replies.

Billy’s out the door the moment he realizes the kids are en route. It’s easy enough to figure why; the week before they’d stood in a hostile line and all but spit in his direction. Truth is, he can’t blame any of them. Billy’s a dick. He’s still a dick to Steve, most of the time. Except –

_Talk to me. Breathe slow. Tell me what you can see._

Whatever. Steve’s long since past the point of thinking he can figure Billy out, and he’s determined to enjoy himself regardless. He’s actually looking forward to the movie; he’s always been a sucker for horror. And given Nancy couldn’t stand it, it’s been a while since he saw any.

Mrs Hargrove drops off Max and Dustin, clutching a Tupperware and peering around for her stepson. She does actually look disappointed when Steve says he’s gone; the tub is full of leftovers, he realizes, from yesterday. “Tell him I asked,” she says quietly. “Tell him Neil – ” Her mouth snaps shut, her smile twisting up with something else. “Never mind,” she says.

Jonathan shows up next with Lucas and Will, and Steve figures for a moment that Mike couldn’t come until the doorbell goes one last time and it’s Nancy standing there, two little Wheelers with big doe eyes and brown shaggy hair and Steve wants instantly to throw himself off the fucking roof. “Hi,” Nancy says, that little shy smile in place as Mike rolls his eyes at the pair of them and pushes his way inside.

“Hi,” Steve flatly replies. You hate horror movies, he wants to say. You hate hanging out with Mike. “I’m heading out.”

Steve wants to run into the middle of the woods and scream, so that’s what he does. The ground’s still a little sketchy underfoot, slippery and rough, and Steve falls on his ass more than once, limps back to the house bruised and scratched and slathered with mud. It’s helped, though, reached through the festering wound in the middle of his chest and scraped out some of the ache. Standing in the middle of the pitch-black with his eyes shut, playing chicken with the dark, listening and listening for any hint of _wub-wub-skkh_ , that unmistakable monster-sound.

The house is quiet when he gets back. The movie’s long since done. There’s only Max and Dustin left, playing checkers in Steve’s living room, and the thought makes Steve nervous until he spots Billy’s car in the drive. The Upside Down might be good and gone, but he still doesn’t like the idea of the kids being here alone.

“Holy shit, dude,” Dustin says when Steve shuffles into the room. “Did you fall down a well or something?”

“Shut up, doofus,” Steve replies, throwing his filthy socks in Dustin’s direction and delighting in his shriek. “You guys need a ride home?”

“My mom’s coming,” Max replies, grinning with smugness as Dustin mops mud out of his hair. She hops up to tail him into the kitchen, watches in silence as he pours himself a glass of milk.

Steve eyes her as he drinks it, suspicious. “I’m not giving you a cigarette,” he says.

Max rolls her eyes. “I don’t want one,” she says flatly. “I wanted to ask about Billy. Is he doing okay?”

Steve blinks. “I dunno,” he admits. “I think so. Why?”

Max frowns at him, as if the question is a dumb one. “I saw him earlier. He seemed different.”

“Good different?” Steve asks, and Max shrugs. “Your mom – ” Steve stops, clueless as to how to continue. “Neil doesn’t – ?”

“No,” Max says quietly, blissfully instinctive. “Just Billy. He didn’t used to as much, before we came here.”

“Who didn’t used to what?” Dustin asks from the doorway. His voice is casual enough to suggest he doesn’t know the seriousness of the question, but Steve sees Max wince.

“Smoke,” Steve lies easily. “Billy didn’t. You look like an Ewok with your hair like that,” he adds, and Dustin clutches at his chest, wounded.

Eventually, Mrs Hargrove comes and goes. Steve takes a shower, reheats the leftovers, eats alone. Resists the urge to pace around the silent, empty house in search of monsters he won’t find.

It’s Billy who finds him, breaking Steve’s skittish vigil of the treeline from his bedroom window a quarter before midnight by swaggering in and kicking shut the door behind him. He looks a little drunk, and when he hustles Steve up against the wall to kiss him his mouth is sour with the tang of whiskey and tobacco.

It’s so fucking easy to let this happen, to let himself surrender to Billy’s bossiness the way he never has with a girl. He’s had a few around who knew what they wanted, but none of them quite so pushy, so liberal with the scrape of their fingernails under Steve’s shirt in a way that makes him shiver. “Look at you,” Billy murmurs when he pulls away, voice thick with arousal and delight, and Steve shudders as he runs his thumb along Steve’s swollen lip. “Two days since getting your dick wet and already desperate.”

Steve’s fingers find their way into Billy’s hair and he pulls, hard. “Bite me,” he hisses back, and Billy’s smile is all teeth. God, he wants to rip him apart. He drags Steve back towards the bed with a hand tangled up in his shirt, quick confident steps as he kisses Steve’s neck and slides his other hand into Steve’s sweats, humming his approval when he finds Steve already half-hard against his palm. I didn’t come find you, Steve wants to say. You came in through my bedroom door and walked straight to me.

They’ve never done anything on a bed before; it’s somehow a whole new feeling, the way Billy transforms into this hot, leaden mass pressing down on every inch of Steve’s skin, grinding against him as they kiss lazily, sloppily, all tongues and teeth. Steve’s usually sprawled out above the girls, and even when they’re on top of him they’re not such a weight. Billy sits back across his hips to pull off his own shirt and jeans, and the pressure of it against Steve’s dick is gorgeous, torturous. Billy gets something out of the jeans pocket before he chucks them on the floor, and Steve cranes up on his elbows to look at it. “What the fuck is that?” he asks, and Billy snorts, tugging at the bottom of Steve’s shirt until he lets him lever it off.

“Don’t worry, princess,” he murmurs, ducking down to bite hard at Steve’s chest. “It ain’t for you.”

Steve forgets all about it when Billy’s mouth reaches his dick and he’s lost in the pleasure of it, the sloppy-tight warmth and the expert sweeps of Billy’s hand. Steve still can’t decide if he’s overwhelmingly grateful for all the guys Billy’s got to practice on before or whether he wants to find them and tear them to shreds.

Billy’s making these hot little choking noise against him in rhythm with the slow rise and fall of Steve’s hips; but when Steve sighs, spreads his legs a little and slides down to relieve a cramp in his back, he realizes they aren’t in time with that at all. Steve looks down at Billy, really looks, past the halo of his hair and the cherry-red lips. “Fuck,” Steve breathes. He looks so fucking beautiful, so spread open and raw, blush high on his chest and his neck, one hand on Steve to steady himself as the other reaches back between his open legs. “Jesus, _Billy_.”

Billy’s grin is fucking wicked. Steve tugs him off, up, up until he’s kissing him again, until he’s able to reach round Billy’s spine and along the cleft of his ass, until he feels the first instances of slick and yielding heat. Billy’s gone still above him, save for this little tremble in his thighs astride Steve’s hips, and Steve gentles the kiss to soothe him as he pushes two thick fingers in.

The soft, choked noise Billy makes sounds totally undone. Steve wonders in a dizzy haze if he’s been planning this, if he paced around the house stocking up on Dutch courage while the kids were still downstairs and Steve looked for monsters in the dark. God, he’s so fucking tight around his fingers the thought of it makes Steve woozy. He wants to ask how long it’s been, but he knows he won’t like the answer. Nancy always said his possessiveness was unbecoming. Maybe the rules will be different with Billy.

Steve moves his fingers, echoes the gentle back-and-forth he knows to open up girls with, feeling the way the muscle loosens under the pressure with faint disbelief. “Like this?” he murmurs, biting a little at Billy’s neck.

“Harder,” Billy mutters, predictably. “Curl them a little – oh, _fuck_ ,” he gasps, and then whines, high and broken and desperate, as Steve catches on and repeats the motion again. Billy’s chasing the sensation already, each roll-slide of his hips dragging their cocks together, and it’s so good, warm and intimate. They’re covered in something slick and Steve doesn’t even know if it’s Billy’s or his. Steve reaches out, wraps his hand around Billy’s dick, and Billy’s eyes fly open, wrecked and blown. “Wait,” he gasps out, “ _Fuck_ , you’ll make me – ”

Steve bites at Billy’s lip, slides a third finger in, and Billy chokes and fucks himself on Steve’s hands for ten long seconds before he comes, shivering as he falls down against him. He can feel the way Billy’s body is clenching and relaxing with the force of it, riding out the shockwaves with short sharp jerks of his hips that do fucking nothing to bring Steve back from the edge.

“Give me a minute and you can fuck me,” Billy says hoarsely, and to his absolute mortification Steve comes instantly at the thought.

“Shit,” Steve breathes when he’s done, staring up at the ceiling, too pleased to really feel the horror of it. Billy’s still sprawled on top of him. “Should I apologize?” he says dazedly, and Billy snorts, this ungracious giggle that makes Steve’s chest swell. His hand with its trio of slick fingers is now resting of the base of Billy’s spine, though Steve has no memory of removing it.

It’s the first time Billy hasn’t fled the moment after he’s come, and Steve makes the most of it, gets his less-gross hand into Billy’s hair and kisses him lazily as their heartbeats slow and their blood begins to cool. He wants to know who taught Billy all this. Who taught him how to get on his knees and take a dick, who taught him that getting fucked in his ass makes him sob and fall to pieces. Fucking California, Steve thinks. Steve had no chance to compete.

Billy’s getting hard again. He can feel the weight of it against his hip, even as the sticky mess they’ve left there begins to congeal and cool. Steve’s never had anyone hang around long enough for him to go again; Steve’s never had his fingers up someone’s ass before. All of this is new ground, scary and thrilling, like he’s relearning everything about his body all over again. Steve skims his still-slick fingers up and down Billy’s spine, and when he lingers for a second at the base of it he feels the way it makes Billy shiver and press back against them with a heady, unbelievable rush.

“Yeah?” he breathes against Billy’s neck, and Billy nods. He grunts a little as Steve slides them in, and Steve doesn’t think it’s with pain but he’s still so fucking gentle, soft, slow movements of his wrist as he listens to the way Billy’s breath hitches on every in-and-out. His dick is filling up against Steve’s, and the sensation is electrifying, the duality of Billy growing pliant against his fingers and hard against his hipbone. Unreal, Steve thinks. It’s all so fucking unreal.

Eventually Billy gets impatient, levers himself up to sit across Steve’s hips and fuck himself back onto his fingers. Billy grabs the jar and slicks up his hand, wrapping his fingers around Steve’s cock with short, precise tugs, and Steve doesn’t get the chance to think it through before Billy’s shuffled inelegantly forward on his knees and lowered himself onto Steve’s dick in one smooth, arcing curve.

Mother of fuck, he’s so tight. He can hear the way Billy’s breath is catching in his throat, feel the way his whole body is trembling with the effort of staying still. His eyes are blown, loose-lidded and heavy, mouth slack in a pant, and if Steve thought he was beautiful before it’s nothing on this. “Does it hurt?” Steve asks, fucked and hoarse.

Billy manages a grin. “Don’t flatter yourself, Harrington,” he murmurs, rolling his hips, and Steve whines at the shift of it, giddy with the way he can feel the flex-and-slack of the muscles in Billy’s thighs under his hand. His nails spasm into Billy’s skin and he grunts his approval, starting up a steady pace as he recovers from the initial shock. He’s rough with himself in a way Steve wouldn’t be, and Steve wonders if that’s part of it, if he likes the sharp edges or if he’s just accustomed to them. The way he’s grinning at Steve, thick and wicked, would definitely suggest the former.

Billy leans down, finds Steve’s mouth with his own, kisses him with a shivering indolence that makes Steve’s head spin. “Fuck,” Steve mumbles against his lips. “You’re gonna make me come again.”

Billy bites Steve’s lip, hard enough to split it. “That’s the idea, sweetheart.”

Steve shakes his head. “Not yet,” he insists, one hand finding Billy’s cock and the other winding into Billy’s hair. “Not before you.”

Billy shudders, bites down hard on his lower lip to keep something in, and Steve thinks enough, fucking enough. No more goddamn secrets. He gets his hands around Billy’s hips and pulls, flips them until Billy falls back against the bed with a choked-out sound. He’d expected Billy to fight back, to shove, to wrestle his way back on top again, but he doesn’t. He turns against the sheets, legs spread, ass up, and says, “C’mon, _fuck_ , I’m fucking close,” and for a long moment Steve loses the ability to think, never mind breathe.

Who did this to you, Steve wonders as he sinks his way back inside and locks one arm tight around Billy’s chest from behind. Who taught you to be this open, this shameless, this free. Billy gets one hand up into Steve’s hair, pulls Steve’s weight down on top of him until there’s almost nothing between them except the little inch of space Steve needs to move his hips. He’s dizzy with the way Billy’s moving under him, squirming in a tortured pattern of pushing himself back onto Steve’s dick and down onto the bedsheets, desperate to take Steve deeper, desperate for friction.

Steve can feel the pleasure building, hot, tight pulses of it ricocheting under his skin, settling to a low, buzzing warmth at the base of his gut. He’s close, but Billy’s closer. “Touch yourself,” Steve murmurs into his ear as he fucks him, “C’mon, baby, bring yourself off for me,” and Billy sobs and bucks and comes into his own fist, quivering with the force of it. Steve digs his teeth into the nape of Billy’s neck and fucks him until he follows.

They lie there together in silence for a time, hazy and exhausted; then Billy huffs out a sound, somewhere between a grunt and a laugh, and gets up off the bed, picking up his clothes with smooth, easy movements that belie no pain or urgency. “I can see why Wheeler kept you around,” he says, rough and self-satisfied, and with a half-flicked salute he walks out without looking back.

“Hey, Tommy,” Steve says into the phone, staring blankly out of the window at the rising sun. “We’re gonna need that keg.”

Billy couldn’t give less of a shit. He shrugs when Steve tells him what they’re planning, like there’s no place in the world he cares to be, and something about it rankles. Steve can’t handle it, can’t handle the way he has to go from feeling Billy come apart under him, around him, and then act like it means nothing. Most of all, Steve hates the way it makes him want to do something cruel.

This has to stop. It has to end. He decides he’ll talk to Hopper, give some excuse, find a way to get Billy out of his house and out of his head. Then he sees Billy, the long sloping line of him stretched out against the wall as he sucks on a cigarette, and Steve’s suddenly dizzy with want again. He’s never been much good with self-restraint. He wants something, so he goes for it. Generally things seem to go his way.

Except with Nancy, a small, spiteful voice says. Steve ignores it and walks out to join Billy for a smoke.

Fuck, it’s freezing. It hasn’t snowed again, though they must be about due another dump of it soon. At least he’s used to it; this must be Billy’s first winter north of Sacramento. Billy’s taking great pains to look unflustered by it, but his pink cheeks and his hunched shoulders are deeply suggestive of misery. “Is it always like this?” Billy asks when Steve gets near, obliging him with a cigarette.

“Honestly, this is pretty temperate for Indiana in November,” Steve replies, leaning in for a light; Billy looks appalled, which makes him smile. “The way you talk about Cali, it’s like a different world. I’ve never even seen the sea. I’ve done Lake Michigan a bunch, but.”

Billy stubs out the cigarette, lights another. “It is,” he says, almost a murmur. “It’s so different.”

Steve hesitates. It’s the million dollar question, and Billy isn’t even drunk to take the edge off. “So why did you move here?”

Billy goes still. “I told you. My dad wanted someplace new. For Susan and Maxine.” Steve doesn’t voice his skepticism; he doesn’t interject. He just waits Billy out, waits in the cold November air as that urge to be seen, to be known, creeps over Billy like a shroud, fights past his instinct to hide. “They caught me fooling around with this guy from my gym class,” Billy says, in time. “Brody.”

Steve winces. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters. “What happened?”

“The Principal called my dad in.” Billy’s mouth twists up, but it’s wholly empty of humor. “I actually thought he was gonna kill me. Then I got home and this priest was there, gave me this whole fucking sermon on how I was corroding my soul with sin.”

Steve can see it. Viscerally. The mere thought of it makes his stomach churn. “Fuck.”

Billy shrugs. “Brody got it worse. He got sent to one of those summer camps. Anyway, my dad threw me down the stairs and the next day he announced we were moving to Indiana.” He pauses to smile and take a drag, this hopeless, tangled-up thing on his face that’s something like irony or malice. “He didn’t even go to church back then. My dad. I don’t think he even got me christened. But of course he’s still gotta drag in Father O’Fuckface to tell me I’m going to burn in hell for being a filthy little queer. It’s right there in the Bible, next to child sacrifice and fucking goats.”

“Don’t,” Steve says, less gentle than he should.

Billy ignores him. “That’s why I started wearing this,” he adds, thumbing the St Christopher. “As proof. They don’t let queers into the army, you know.”

Steve blinks. “You weren’t kidding?” he says slowly, disbelieving. “You really want to go off and become daddy’s little soldier?”

“I don’t know,” he mutters. “It’s something.”

Steve stares at him. “It’s crazy,” he says.

Billy eyes him with clear dislike. “Is that what you think? That I’m crazy?”

“I didn’t say that,” Steve answers slowly, feeling his own temper begin to fray. “Not everything I say is a trap, okay? We’re not all like – ”

“Like what? Like me?” Steve snorts, doesn’t dignify this with an answer, but it does nothing to placate him. “You’re so full of shit, Harrington. You don’t know a fucking thing about me.”

This hits, harder than it should, and in the moment Steve isn’t sure if it’s from the dishonesty or the truth. “I know you’re scared,” he says, reckless.

Billy’s brow creases up with fury. Wrong move, Steve thinks absently, and then decides he doesn’t give a damn. He’s so tired of treading on eggshells, treating Billy like a child because he’s trying not to piss him off. “I’m scared?” Billy echoes incredulously. “At least I don’t sleep with the light on like a fucking baby,” he says. “Like a fucking faggot.”

Steve flinches. “Don’t use that word.”

“Why, because you are one?” Billy squares his shoulders. “Faggot,” he spits.

Steve snaps. “Last I checked you were the one who liked getting fucked in the ass, Hargrove,” Steve says, and Billy hits him.

The world freezes around them. Billy goes white. It’s funny, how two weeks ago it wouldn’t have mattered at all. Steve wouldn’t be sure it even mattered now, except Billy’s staring at him like he wants to throw up, hands slack at his side and shoulders high, trembling. 

Billy turns on his heel and flees. A moment later, he hears the distant sound of the Camaro’s engine fire up. Steve slumps down the wall. He’s not fucking chasing him. He’ll be back.


	5. Chapter 5

Billy doesn’t come back. Billy goes missing for three fucking days, and Steve is half-convinced he’s dead. There’s no call from Susan, from Hopper, from the hospital, the morgue. On day four Neil Hargrove turns up at his front door, banging on it like the devil himself, so much so that Steve finds himself reaching for the comforting handle of the baseball bat before he even knows who it is.

“Send him out,” Neil says, the moment he opens the door. He’s so small, Steve realizes. If Billy hadn’t told him, he’d never have known. “Don’t play dumb with me, kid. I got it out of Max that you’ve been hiding him.”

The phrasing makes Steve’s stomach turn. “Is she okay?”

Fury flares in Neil’s face. “Who in the hell do you think I am, son?” he hisses, taking one tight, angry step towards him. “And what in the hell is a senior doing hanging around with a bunch of middle-school kids anyway?”

Steve clenches his jaw. “He isn’t here,” he says, failing to keep his voice cool.

“Bullshit.”

Steve steps back. “Believe what you fucking like,” he says, spreading his hands, “But I haven’t seen him in days. If you don’t get off our property in ten minutes I’m calling Hop.”

At six a.m. on day five, the phone finally goes. It’s Hopper. Steve instantly assumes the worst.

 _“You know that favor I owe you?”_ Hopper says down the line. _“I think you’re gonna want to cash it.”_

Billy’s been picked up three towns over, drunk and disorderly. He wrapped his car round a tree. He’s not hurt bad, Hop says. Or least not anyplace that it shows.

It’s barely light as Steve drives over, the leaves on the trees glittering with frost. The whole world feels like it’s sleeping, watery light and winter silence bleeding through the air. Steve’s never spent much time in Marion, a small strip of a place barely notable even to the people who live there; he’s no idea how Billy wound up in jail there. Honestly, he doesn’t really care. He just wants to get him home.

At first glance, Billy looks like absolute shit; but even then it’s not as bad as when he gets his eyes on Steve, waiting at the front desk with the jacket Billy left hanging up in the hall. He doesn’t say a word as he tails Steve out to the car, doesn’t comment on the pointed way the desk sergeant rips up the paperwork and waves them off, doesn’t even press closer to the heater when Steve fires up the engine and pulls out of the parking lot.

It’s Indiana. There’s nothing around Marion except fields. They barely even pass another car on the road, and neither of them has spoken even after a good five miles has gone by. Steve slides a glance Billy’s way; he’s curled up on himself a little, eyes trained on the emptiness outside. He looks tired, and young, and small. “We’re gonna get you to a doctor,” Steve says.

Billy flinches. “I can’t afford a fucking shrink,” he replies. His voice sounds wrecked.

Steve adjusts his fingers on the wheel. “I’ll sell my car,” he says, and Billy rankles.

“You can’t sell your car.”

“It’s my goddamn car,” Steve says flatly back. “I don’t care about the money, Billy.”

Billy sneers. “You know who says that? People with too much fucking money.”

“Billy, it’s just a fucking car.”

“Stop pretending you give a shit,” Billy snaps. “I’m just a pet with a tight ass and a warm mouth, and you’re just a sucker with a big house and a hard-on. I know how this shit works.”

Steve pulls up at the side of the road and gets out. He’s so furious he’s shaking with it, too fired up to even notice the ice-cold press of the November air against his skin. Behind him, he hears the clunk-thud of the car door opening and closing, the crunch of Billy’s boots against the frost-thick ground. “I’m not doing this again,” Steve says, rounding on him. “I’m not taking you back to my home.” Billy doesn’t even look surprised, and that hurts, more than Steve thought it would. “Did you mean it?”

Billy flinches. “Harrington. Calm down.”

“Did you mean it?” Steve says again, stepping up close. Fuck, he knows what Billy smells like, knows what he looks like when he laughs, knows what he sounds like when he comes. He’s missed him, he’s wanted him, he’s worried about him for four long days, and here’s Billy stood in front of him saying none of it matters at all.

“Yes,” Billy replies, hard and cold, and Steve reels like he’s been punched. He thinks he’s going to throw up. I defended you, he wants to say. I defended you to everyone. I defended you to my fucking _mom_.

Steve laughs. He can’t help it. “Okay,” he says, throwing his hands up in the air and walking back towards the car. “Have a nice life, dickhead.”

Billy moves, gets between him and the driver’s door. A car zips past heading south; the horn blares at the two of them fighting over the handle, the driver jeering as he goes by. Billy’s so close Steve can feel the huff of his breath against his cheek. “Did you mean it?” Steve says again, rough with anger.

Billy’s eyes are bright. “No,” he grits out, in time, and Steve’s stomach swoops with a sick kind of victory.

“Then say it,” Steve hisses. “Fucking say it, Billy.”

“I didn’t mean it,” Billy says.

Steve pulls away. “Get in the car,” he says.

They drive back in silence. “Go take a shower,” Steve says, once they’re inside the house, Billy glancing around the hall like he’s never been there before, like there’s something he’s expecting to see but doesn’t find. “I’ll fix us something to eat.”

Steve heads into the kitchen. He never hears the shower turn on. When Steve goes in search of him with a plate of eggs and bacon, Billy’s nowhere to be found.

* * *

Billy’s done a lot of stupid things in his life, he knows. He’s lived in Hawkins for three months, barely knows his way to the general store and back, but the minute Steve leaves him alone in the hallway he’s out of the door and into the woods without even looking back. He saw the way Steve looked at him, out on the road. He can’t stay. He doesn’t know what’s worse, the pity or the hate.

Within a minute, Billy’s disappeared into the treeline. Around him, in gentle, sloping waves, it starts to snow.

It’s dark long before Billy’s getting close. In all honesty Billy doesn’t even know if he is getting close, just tries to skirt south of the town with the sun at his back and hoping that he finds the cabin before the wolves find him. By nightfall, the snow’s settled up to his ankles. He can barely see three feet. The ground begins to slope up beneath him, enough to put him out of breath, and he’s so focused on not falling on his ass he nearly trips over El before he hears her say “Stop.”

Billy stops. He looks up, finds her stood in front of him with one hand raised, a look of cross concentration on her face. His stomach sinks. Then she twitches her fingers, and right in the place he would’ve stepped next a bear trap snaps shut.

Her nose is bleeding; she grins at him as she wipes the stain away. “Hungry?” she asks, voice sweet, and Billy’s stomach growls.

The cabin is small, smaller than he remembered. Billy feels twitchy, resentful of its coziness and annoyed that it’s the only place he could think of to stay. He figures Hopper was the one who got him off in Marion, and the thought of being at Steve Harrington’s mercy for any longer makes him feel ill.

Hopper stares unblinkingly at him the moment he walks through the door. “Did you walk here?” Hopper asks, incredulous; Billy shrugs. “Well, now I know why Harrington’s been trying to get a hold of me,” he adds, pulling off his jacket and dropping it on the couch. “I’m guessing you haven’t told him you’re here.”

Billy shakes his head. “Sorry, sir,” he says, voice hoarse from lack of use. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

Hopper nods once. “Go take a smoke, would you? I need to talk to El.”

Billy goes. He sits out on the porch, staring out into the dark, splashed pale with the white hush falling down around them. “He is like me,” he hears El say, through the crack in the door. He knows he should keep moving until he can’t hear them anymore, but he doesn’t.

“Oh, yeah?” Hopper replies. “How so?”

“No Mama,” she says. “No Papa. No home.”

In time Hopper joins him out front, bums a light for his awful cigar. “Two rules,” he says through a cloud of blue-black smoke. “You have to go to school. And you can’t tell anyone about her.”

It’s a fair deal. Fairer than he’s worthy of. Billy nods. “Okay,” he says.

In the morning, Billy goes to school. He’s got no way to drive himself there; Hopper has to take him into town and drop him a few blocks away like a fucking child. He’d be angrier about it if it weren’t his own fault. The Camaro was his freedom. It seems fitting that he fucked it up too.

He’d expected Steve to make a fuss, to shove him around, to create some big scene when they got back to Hawkins High, but the reality is infinitely worse. They lock eyes across the parking lot, Billy making his way in on foot through the snow with a cluster of upperclassmen; Steve’s mouth twists up in a nothing-smile and he instantly looks away. He doesn’t even break step, doesn’t even falter in his rapid-fire back-and-forth with Tommy, jostling one another and laughing at some stupid joke.

Billy doesn’t go back after that. He wanders the back streets of Hawkins, or what counts for back streets there, relishing the way little old ladies duck their heads and scuttle away at the sight of him. He finds out where Nelson buys his weed, cuts out the middleman, makes a tidy profit selling it on. He knows how the world works; he won’t get anywhere without something to live off. He needs the cash.

All the while, he misses Steve like a gut wound, a rotting tooth. A constant, rolling ache, nebulous and ever-present. He deserves every bit of it, he knows.

It lasts just over a week before Hopper gets tipped off. It’s Friday afternoon, the hazy pink sky sloping into dusk, and Hopper waits for Billy outside the station like usual; but this time he twitches his fingers in the direction of the next-door diner instead of his patrol car. Billy’s heart sinks.

Hopper has the decency to hold off until their drinks arrive; or perhaps he wants to torture him with the wait. “We had two rules, kid,” he says, voice calm, taking a pull of his beer. “What happened?”

Billy ducks his head. “I’m sorry, sir.” The glass of Billy’s soda is ice-cold against his palm; he feels too queasy to take a single sip.

Hopper regards him in silence for a while. “Is it the teachers?” he asks. “The lessons? Are you confused or are you bored?” Billy glances away, out of the window and into the Indiana snow. It’s all too vague, too personal for him to feel like he can explain. “You don’t seem like the type to be bullied,” Hopper says in response to his incalcitrance, and Billy flinches. “Huh,” Hopper says. “Who is it?”

He’s little off the mark, but a lie’s best told with a grain of reality. “Harrington,” Billy says, through gritted teeth like it pains him. Truthfully, it does.

“Steve?” Hopper echoes with clear disbelief, before he schools himself calm again. “Okay. Do you want me to talk to him?”

“No, sir. I can handle it. I’ll do better.”

“I told you not to call me that,” Hopper says. It’s gentle, admonishing. “I’ve been talking to the guys at the lab,” Hopper adds, after a beat. “You can still go see a doctor there if you want.”

Billy’s head snaps up. “A shrink?”

“I know, it sounds – ” Hopper gestures vaguely, clumsy with the words. “But it’ll help. A lot of my guys have been in that position, believe it or not.”

Billy wets his lips. “Do I have to?”

“I’m not gonna kick you out if you don’t,” Hopper promises slowly. “But I also think you should consider it.” Hopper lets it lie, grabs a burger and fries to go and a crate of Yoo-hoo from the kitchen for El. Billy wonders what the servers must think of them, of Billy slinking away into the back of Hopper’s car on a Friday night with a trunkful of chocolate milk.

Billy goes for a walk in the woods when they get back. He should be scared of walking off alone, he knows, but he isn’t. Billy stands in the creeping, icy dark and wonders, not for the first time, if they chose him, those things from another world. Whether he’d just been unlucky, wrong time, wrong place, dragged through in the creature’s pain-drenched throes as it tried desperately to find another home. Or maybe not; maybe it looked for someone it thought it could use. Someone with the same violence, the same anger, the same vitriol. Someone it recognized and understood.

This, Billy hasn’t missed. The same rattle of the fan, the painfully-bright walls. The doctor with his bored expression, lounging in an uncomfortable plastic chair across the table with its incongruous box of Kleenex. He’s not flipping through his charts this time; he’s staring at Billy, sharklike, waiting for one of them to blink. “It’s been a while since we last saw you,” the doctor says. “How have you been?” Billy shrugs. “You requested we resume these sessions. You must feel there’s something to discuss.”

Billy shrugs again. “Trouble sleeping,” he says.

He expects the doctor to make some little note on his clipboard; he doesn’t. He stares at Billy flatly, asks, “Nightmares or insomnia?”

“Both, I guess,” he admits.

The doctor tilts his head, curious. “What happens in your nightmares?”

“Those – those things. They hurt people.” Billy pauses. “I hurt people.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“No,” Billy says, instant and appalled. “Jesus, who the fuck do you think I am?”

The doctor raises his hands, fingers spread in contrition. “How do you feel, then?”

Billy wets his lips. “Scared,” he admits.

“Of what you’ll do?” the doctor asks, and Billy shrugs, more helpless than disobedient. He’s not sure he knows the answer. “You were arrested,” he adds.

Billy suppresses a flinch. “There’s no record of that.”

The doctor smiles wryly. “There’s no record of this place existing,” he points out, gesturing around him. “It doesn’t mean it’s not real.” He narrows his eyes a little, watches at Billy in silence for a time. “Would you describe yourself as a violent person?”

Billy’s jaw clenches. “You’ve asked me that before,” he points out.

The doctor’s smile is back. “You didn’t answer me before.”

Billy looks away. He counts the tiles on the floor, one two three four five and back again, trying to block out the image of Steve’s face just after he landed the punch. He pulls in a breath. “I have to be,” he admits quietly. “Sometimes.”

The doctor hums under his breath. “What happens if you aren’t?” he asks; Billy doesn’t answer. “Do you imagine it garners respect?”

_What did we talk about?_

Billy shuts his eyes, kneads at them hard with the crux of his palms. “Do you enjoy it?” the doctor asks, and Billy startles; for a moment he’d forgotten he was there. “The violence,” he clarifies, when Billy doesn’t answer. “I think it gives you power. Or the illusion of it, anyway. I also don’t think people are born violent.”

Billy stares at him. “Meaning?”

“Someone shaped you this way,” the doctor says, and his voice, his smile, his eyes are all kind. “So you can unshape yourself again, if you want to. If you’re brave.”

Tuesday, December eleventh, and Nancy’s story breaks. It’s a good job, a clever job, a woven blanket of lies and mistruths sketched around the real. Hawkins becomes a festering hive of press vans and Billy, spooked by the size of it, doesn’t step foot out of the woods for days.

It’s how he runs into Will. It’s the first time he’s ever seen the kid alone, which throws him for a loop; it feels wrong somehow, like he’s going around missing a limb without Jonathan or Mike or his mother fussing a few feet away. He finds him out by the quarry, hands jammed in his pockets, staring down at the water below. His bike’s upturned beside him, one wheel still clicking gently. For a moment Billy worries he’s trespassing, that he’s blundered into some moment of quiet he has no place in, but then Will spots him at the treeline and waves, his smile small and shy.

“You okay, kid?” he asks once he draws close.

Will nods. “They kept wanting to talk to zombie boy,” he explains, wrinkling his nose, the dislike palpable. “Didn’t take them long to figure I was linked into the stuff with the lab.”

Fucking hacks, Billy thinks. “Your mom know you’re out here?”

Will flushes a little. “Not exactly. I just – needed some space to think,” he says, a little lamely, beseeching. Billy won’t begrudge him the peace. “You know,” Will adds, staring out across the water, “We’re the only two who’ve had it in our heads.”

Billy glances at him, surprised. It honestly hasn’t occurred to him. “You think there’s a reason for that?”

Will shrugs. “I’d say we’re pretty different,” he says, and there’s a truth to that Billy would readily admit. “Do you think it’s gonna come back?”

For a moment, Billy doesn’t answer. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t know if stuff like that ever stops happening. But I think you’re gonna be okay.” Will looks tired, resigned, and stupidly young. It makes him think of Max, scowling and powerful, looming over him with the baseball bat. It makes Billy think of himself at that age, how frightened of the world he’d been in the newfound absence of his mom, the newfound discovery of his dad’s rage. At least the monsters he knew came from the same world as him. “Will you let me walk you home?” he asks.

“Sure,” Will says, and smiles.

Talking with Will is a short-lived reprieve. Jonathan finds them out on the road, glaring at Billy with such suspicion and hate that it makes him feel sick. If he still had his car, he’d have gunned right out of town without looking back, but he doesn’t; so he does the next best thing. Billy finds his way to a bar, sweet-talks his way into a bottle of whiskey, and walks off with it in hand to the quiet solitude of the woods.

It could be the drink, the cold, the lack of sleep, or the shitty weed he scored off Nelson’s dealer the week before, but by the time night falls Billy’s totally lost. It shouldn’t scare him; for a while he pretends that it doesn’t, that he’s just going to stumble his way back to civilization any moment. Then he gets an image, a vivid flash of that other place, of staggering around that endless, barren world with a monster on his heels and it instantly makes him retch.

Billy leans up against a tree, shaking with the force of holding himself up. Hopelessly, pointlessly, he shouts out names: Hopper, El, Will. No answer; he hadn’t truthfully expected one.

“Steve?” he tries, cracking on the word like it’s his last bit of hope. There’s no reply.

* * *

It would have been nice, Steve decides, for Nancy to give him some kind of heads up. He’s cruising into school and fighting his way through camera crews before he knows something’s up, and then some moron sophomore points a finger in Steve’s face and says _he knew Barbara Holland_ and he’s hotfooting it back out the parking lot before the bell’s even rung. He goes straight to warn Joyce, has to turn tail again when he arrives at the Byers’ place to find her driveway already swamped.

The Harrington house is mercifully silent; the only people who know exactly where Barb went missing are him and Nancy, and she thankfully seems to have left that little factoid out of her report. He rings Dustin to offer his place as a hideout if things get rough; “ _Pool party!”_ Dustin crows down the line, and Steve pinches the brow of his nose and says no, you have to at least try to go to school, before giving in and hanging up.

Hawkins Middle gets a half-day when a bunch of reporters jump the fence, so it is at least mid-afternoon before Steve has to put up with the bunch of them flitting around his living room like feral cats. He’s ruled the pool off limits; it’s too damn cold for Steve to sit out there to watch them, for one thing. Steve digs out a bunch of VHSes and board games and endeavors, somewhat hopelessly, to write his essay on the Russian revolution in the corner of the room as the four of them bicker their way through _The Cat from Outer Space_.

Mrs Wheeler comes for Mike and Lucas around five, which leaves Steve with Dustin and Max. He picks a longer route than he might by choice, still twitchy; it takes him through a bunch of side roads, skimming alongside the woods. As they turn towards the town again Steve spots some moron slumped at the side of the road, but it isn’t until his headlights dip down onto the sprawled figure that Max startles. “Isn’t that Billy?” she says slowly, and Steve swears under his breath.

Billy’s not lucid when Steve levers him into the car. He’s freezing, shaking in a way that seems feverish. Steve wonders how long he’s been out there with nothing but a jeans jacket in the cruel December cold. Dustin scoots across the back seat to make room as Steve manhandles him inside. “Steve, buddy,” he says, a little hysterical, “This is all getting a bit George Romero back here – ”

“I’ll drop you first,” Steve interrupts, glaring at him flatly in the rearview mirror. “He can come back to mine.”

Billy’s sleeping fitfully by the time Steve gets him home. He runs him a scalding bath, tries to keep it as dignified as he possibly can as he bathes and dresses him in clean clothes. He’s fully out of it by the time Steve lays him out in bed, the same guestroom he’d shown him three and a half weeks before. It’s strange, Steve thinks, watching over him from the hallway to make sure he settles before closing the door. How little time it’s been, how much has changed.

Hopper shows up later, much later, knocking gently with the butt of his flashlight on the back door. It scares the shit out of him for a minute, but Hopper is right in his assumption that Steve wouldn’t answer the bell. “Kids told me you had him,” he says, looking past Steve’s shoulder at the seemingly-empty house.

“He’s asleep,” Steve replies. He meant it to be reassuring; Hopper looks deeply unconvinced.

“He told me there was some kind of problem between you,” Hopper says slowly.

Steve stares at him. “Seriously?” he asks flatly, trying not to laugh. “Well, I hauled his drunk ass here off the roadside, so it can’t be too bad.”

Hopper considers him for a moment. “Alright,” he concedes, in time. “Let me know if you want me to bring him home.”

The word rankles, his dislike of it lingering long after Hopper’s gone. Steve locks all the doors, turns off all the lights, retrieves his baseball bat and finds his way to the guest room. Billy’s still sound asleep; he’s warm to the touch, but not overly. Steve can’t bring himself to join him, can’t bring himself to go. Fuck it, he thinks. It’s my house. He makes himself a bed on the floor out of blankets and pillows from his room and lies there in the dark, listening to the sound of them breathing in sync, and thinks about the way it feels like peace.

Steve must fall asleep too, because he wakes to the sound of Billy vomiting in the ensuite sink. He weighs up the likelihood of Billy needing help or wanting sympathy, and decides he’d rather stay sat until Billy’s put himself together enough to come back into the room.

When Billy does, he still looks like shit. He jumps at the sight of Steve, sat up in his tangled nest of sleep-stuff on the other side of the room. “How did I get here?” Billy asks, having recovered a little of his dispassion; he tries to sound nonchalant. He fails. He sounds about as wrecked as he looks.

“I found you,” Steve says, getting to his feet. “Out by the road. You’re sick. Get in bed.”

Billy’s jaw clenches. “Gotta get to school,” he says, diving for the doorway, but he’s not fast enough to get there before Steve does.

“Bullshit,” Steve snaps, filling up the doorframe. “We both know you’ve been bunking.”

Billy tries to push past him. “All the more reason – ”

“ _Billy_ ,” Steve interrupts, and Billy sits down on the edge of the bed. It’s something, at least. He looks so lost, so angry, so tired. Steve’s struggling to forget why he’s pissed with him, but also brawling against the crowded weight of warmth burning in his chest.

“Why are you helping me?” Billy asks, looking up at him, eyes hard with unease and suspicion.

Because I’m a sucker with a big house and a hard-on, Steve wants to say, but he doesn’t. He scrubs a hand through his hair, sighs a little, crosses the room to sit down next to him. “Honestly, for a while back there I thought we were friends,” Steve admits, and Billy looks away.

“I’ve done so many terrible things to so many people,” Billy says, after a beat. His voice is hoarse and shaky with fatigue, or maybe sorrow. “Shit I can’t even begin to make good. I never even said sorry to you.”

“So say it now,” Steve murmurs, almost over-gently. “Are you sorry?” he asks; Billy says nothing. “I think you are,” he hazards. “So why can’t you say it out loud? What are you so afraid of?”

For a long time Billy seemingly can’t answer, staring down at the tangled shape of his hands, fingers twisted together in his lap. “You,” he says eventually, wrenched out like it pains him to talk. “Proving that I’m everything I think I am.”

Oh, Steve thinks, as the whole world around him suddenly makes perfect sense. “You’re never gonna know if you don’t try,” he replies. Billy stares at him, big blue eyes full of a hot mix of things Steve can’t quite divine, anger or confusion or exhaustion or all of the above. Come on, Steve wants to say. Please. Trust me. But instead he waits, for what feels like an eternity, for Billy to decide.

“I’m sorry,” Billy says, and Steve kisses him, soft, gentle, shallow, tender, and everything it wasn’t before.

Billy’s gone when Steve steps out the shower. For a moment it spooks him; but the familiar smell of coffee hits him as soon as he’s in the hall, and the fear rushes out of him in an instant. Billy’s sat at the breakfast bar, hands wrapped around his mug and staring out into the dwindling darkness, the sky rimming the trees gently turning from black to white. Huh, Steve thinks. Déjà vu.

He grabs a mug and fills it out of the fancy cafetière his parents bought in Paris. The whole house sometimes feels like it’s littered with their souvenirs, like Steve is just one more memento they trapped under a glass and let loose to dress the place; but less so, since Billy came. More like his home again.

Billy smiles at him when he sits, moves up a little so they’re in each other’s space, touching from shoulder to elbow. “I’ve been thinking,” Steve says.

Billy slides him a look. “Did you hurt yourself?” he asks sweetly, and Steve snorts.

“Jesus, what are you, twelve?”

Billy shrugs, grinning a little. “Bite me,” he replies. “What about?”

“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” Steve says. “We’re gonna graduate. I’m gonna find us an apartment, somewhere a long fucking way away from here. Chicago, Indianapolis, fucking Alaska, I don’t care.”

“How would you feel about California?” Billy asks, and he’s smiling like a fucking sunset, golden and soft and warm.

* * *

It’s a quiet Hawkins afternoon. Snow drifts down around him in slow, silent waves, muffling the street so completely that even the air Billy breathes feels hushed. Billy reaches up and knocks on the front door, three sharp raps that rip through the suburban quiet. He counts his breaths as he waits for an answer, splays his fingers to feel the ice-bite of cold against his skin, grounding.

Neil Hargrove opens the door. “Sir,” Billy says, on instinct, snapping to attention just like he’s been taught.

Neil regards him in silence for a long, awful while. “Sorry,” he says blankly. “I think you must have the wrong house.”

Billy nods once. He wants to scream and cry and laugh all at once, but he won’t give Neil the satisfaction. “Apologies, sir,” he says coolly, turning on the spot. “Have a nice day.”

Billy walks, and walks, and walks, one sharp, calm step after the other, pulling in big cold lungfuls of the chilly air. It doesn’t feel like rejection, he decides. It feels like freedom.

He doesn’t hear Max coming until he nearly falls over her, zooming past him on her skateboard on the treacherously slick tarmac of the road. It’s dangerous, he wants to say, but he doesn’t; he knows by now she’s more than capable of handling herself. “I saw you at the door,” she says by way of explanation, a little breathless from the chase.

Billy looks her over carefully. “You’re okay?” Billy asks. “He isn’t hurting you?”

She shakes her head. “He seems – calmer, without you around.”

Billy isn’t naïve enough to believe it’ll last, but he nods. She knows where to find him if she needs to, and has better friends than him to turn to anyway. “See you around,” he says, ruffling her hair before she can dodge out of the way of his hand, and walks away for the last time from Cherry Lane.

* * *

* * *

It’s Friday night in San Francisco; the club is buzzing, hectic with the haphazard mix of the everyday mob and the weekend crowd, both jostling pridefully for the bartenders’ attention. Billy leans up against the end of the bar and takes slow, even pulls of his beer, sharp eyes watching the stairs in, the dancefloor, the long stretch of the counter beside him. He’s late, he thinks with a scowl.

They must’ve let him in the back way, Billy decides. It’s the only way Steve could’ve got the jump on him, coming in close and murmuring _come here often?_ in his ear before Billy even knows he’s there. Billy thumps him on the arm hard, glaring disapproval at Steve’s cackle, and then swoops in for a kiss, deep, fleeting and possessive. “You are such a dork,” Billy says, murmured against his mouth, feeling the way Steve grins in response.

“Happy birthday,” Steve replies, radiating cheery pleasure. “It taste different legal?”

“Nope,” Billy answers, helping himself to another mouthful of beer. The music changes; something poppy, preppy, and upbeat Billy vaguely recognizes. Fuck, this scene has such awful taste, but Steve crows out in obvious delight and grabs at Billy’s hand, pulling him towards the dancefloor. “You’re impossible,” Billy yells over the beat, but still, smiling like a beacon, he goes.


End file.
